‘Interlude: The reader’s traces.’ is a project by Mariana Castillo Deball with contributions by: Hubert Czerepok, Paul Elliman, Dario Gamboni, Raimundas Malasauskas, Harry Mathews, Ian Monk, Peter Piller, Manuel Raeder, Steve Rushton and Enrique Vila-Matas. Books in libraries are public items; many different people have read the same copy. Each reader leaves its own traces and marks: a piece of paper used to separate the pages in the book, a note, a train ticket; they become unresolved texts, hints to be disclosed. The discovery of these traces works as an opening up, occupying an intermediate space or an iterative time.Excess or residues, are remains of an event that implies a deficit or a gap. Traces of an original experience, they displace this experience, as a point of origin for subsequent narratives around it.These interruptions suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force to enter a new time, cut it from its original motivations. For one moment the database structure of the library and the narrative experience of reading come together.

Made possible with the support of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands. (2005)