&: christophe daviet-thery

Being a bookseller, is to chose and recommend. To assert one’s subjectivity, whilst excluding an exhaustive approach. Being a publisher, is to conceive the most accurate and meaningful form. Being a curator, is to confront, rethink content as a form. Three professions that share books and bookshelves.
If we are to consider art as a daily experience, it prompts us to question the notion of appropriation, which the book, as a medium, enables.
When it isn’t a collector’s item, a book is a familiar object, identifiable and of daily use, and whose economic format makes it readily available to a wider audience, and in a certain way democratic. To purchase a book is a cultural and political act. A book is a nomadic object, one that can be slipped in a pocket, taken along everywhere, as professor Kein in Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-fé who always had a book. One by one, they come to shape a library, a space for all possabilities and encounters, of which Jorge Luis Borges said: « I’ve always imagined paradise to be a kind of library ». A library arises from juxtaposition, not accumulation.
The book is apprehended in a transversal manner, by confronting it to different mediums, finding interest in its use to the context in which it appeared. These intersections give the bookseller’s profession a broader definition, ranging from curator of projects such as vis-à-vis or je déballe ma bibliothèque, to that of an editor when a book needs to be thought of as an exhibition space as for Allan Kaprow. Posters. With this constant redefining of the profession, comes the notion of complementarity, because similarly to the library, projects come about as additions symbolised by the &.