Talk: Backstories from Talking Leaves and Pulp Vol. III - Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book

Shubigi Rao
PULP III: AN INTIMATE INVENTORY OF THE BANISHED BOOK
VOLUME III OF V, 2022

Written specifically for the Singapore Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022 in Venice, Shubigi Rao’s book is an artwork that chronicles the vast array of issues surrounding books, libraries and communities. Copies of the book are arranged in the exhibition in a way that speaks of the monumentality of the book as a container of knowledge and progenitor of change.

Over the course of this exhibition, the installation will change in form as the books are dispersed, germinating small libraries, resisting erasure, and circumventing geopolitical and cultural divides. For Rao, each book is a messenger, a time-traveller, the embodiment of our need to communicate, and a rallying call to action. By carrying the book into the wider world, you are performing this conceptual gesture.

Similar to the presentation in Venice, the book is offered as a complimentary artwork, a form of sharing and generosity that is integral to Rao’s method and her long term project that spans the globe — a project that engages with the complexities of access and dissemination of books, as well as the act of sharing knowledge across cultures. If you visit the exhibition and wish to participate in this project by taking a book, the artist asks that you share with her your full name, email address, the institution you represent, as well as the destination of the book. This allows her to make evident how books travel and initiate genuine connections between people across the globe, one of the core intentions of her Pulp project. In taking a book, you are entrusted with the ownership of her artwork, as well as her intention for this gesture. At the end of the project, Rao will be creating an artistic representation of the book’s journey through the world, which will be shared by email with all carriers of the book.

The data collected is purely for this purpose, and kept only, and confidentially, by the artist.

If you choose to not participate in this aspect of the project, you may also enjoy, read and experience the book here.

Wouldn’t it be thrilling
for all of this to be useful —
confetti at a fascist parade,
Ashes of books
Flying up
from the conflagration

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 230.

—Shubigi Rao, An Imprecise Indexical from Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book, Volume II of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2018.

The ironic

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was an ironic exercise to deal with the bewildering loss of ground that classicism, the ancients, and religion suffered as a consequence of empirical evidence and natural philosophy. It is one example of the power and endurance of literary irony. As a means of dealing with loss, irony works in both the fictional and political realms, charged as both are with absurdities.¹¹² Hav may be read in either realm, or in both, and its irony retains its luminous charge. Fictions, especially useful ones, needn’t necessarily be fatal, as long as the absurdism of their elusions is apprehended, and it is through ironic distance that literature challenges oppression. The Czechs and their writers, from Kafka to Karel Čapek, Bohumil Hrabal to Václav Havel, maintained a persistent identity through multiple oppressions, occupations, and totalitarian regimes. Passive resistance here involved the precepts of literary irony, not elusion, and a healthy dose of gallows humour. The ironic library, then, is one that deals with loss, and one that negates irrationalism through the absurd. Historically, this library has habitually been targeted by the totalitarian, and yet it has as often escaped suppression, burning, and destruction. Whether through physical existence as samizdat, or a subtextual one as satire,¹¹³ the ironic library persists and is never completely lost.

112 That imaginative dissembler Herodotus is often called the Father of History, yet The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the more factual Gibbon was one of the many books labelled as morally dangerous and heresy in that vicious screed, Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 61.

The useful

Fictive does not mean not functional — the ideal library is alive, universal, default, it contains multiple languages, true and false, and all sources (often unverifiable) listed, even dead endings, slipping between fair use and commons, academic and non-, denying and welcoming. Wikipedia is fictive, functional, and useful. It is often the first result on a Google search page. It beckons us into the blue of link and cross-reference. What could be easier? And yet as mass literacy is now the norm rather than the exception, as we talk about online access as a human right, we know less and are less likely to look for what we don’t know. We fashion echo chambers, hermetic little comfort rooms, rarely venture beyond our soft swaddling-buffer of white noise. Algorithms help us narrow our news feeds; we only need to read so much and no further. Fictive, functional, futile.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 57.

The unfinished

Like this list, the library is always incomplete: lost people and their vanished libraries, fragments, and indecipherable detritus. Lost manuscripts, painstakingly rebuilt.¹⁰⁷ A posthumous publication of an unfinished text will forever intrigue, from Perec’s Portrait of Man to Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, while vanished manuscripts (that may never have existed) take on a mythic, Atlantean status.

In 1627, the incomplete, utopian vision of Francis Bacon, apparent godfather of the Western scientific revolution,¹⁰⁸ was posthumously published. The New Atlantis (like most utopias) was situated on an imagined island where humanity had attained a technological, scientific, moral, and humanist pinnacle. Taking the form of a travelogue, its fictive premise nevertheless had far-reaching effects,¹⁰⁹ partly inspiring the establishment of the Royal Society¹¹⁰and, in turn, a savage satirizing by Swift in another fictitious travel tale.¹¹¹ Gulliver’s Travels is parody written in the vein of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of which Swift was an avid reader. It is also perhaps noteworthy that travellers’ stories tend to be, at the very least, tall tales (a tradition that Jan Morris referenced to good effect in her only novel Hav). As the ultimate tall tale, the utopia excites as much as it remains elusive. By the impossibility of its existence, a utopia is necessarily imperfect, and so too is the fiction of the absolute, the complete, and the wholly truthful.

107 Archaeologist and military officer T E Lawrence famously described the laboriously reconstructed and rewritten version of his autobiography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as ‘hopelessly bad’, after losing the first manuscript in a train station. See Robert McCrum, ‘First Drafts’, Observer, 18 January 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/18/features.review4.

108 As well as being a philosopher, statesman, jurist, scientist, essayist, and author, Bacon remains a contender for Shakespearean authorship.

109 The depictions of religious equality and legal reform in The New Atlantis possibly influenced the drafting of future liberal constitutions, with some attributing the abolition of slavery, the rise of women’s rights, and the separation of church and state to this work.

110 See Pete Langman, ‘Francis Bacon: New Atlantis’, The Literary Encyclopedia1.2.1.03, 14 April 2010, https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3262.

111 By including Bacon, the Royal Society, Hooke and the microscopic, Copernicus and the telescopic, and Hobbes, Spinoza, and other humanists, Swift seems to have rounded up most of the scientific luminaries of the time in his parodying of their work and methods.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 59.

—Shubigi Rao, The Wood for the Trees, 2018, film still.

The testimony

The text claimed to be truth teller once, as did the letterpress the intaglio print, till the photographic became evidence. Not long after that, the frozen frame was found to be fraudulent, as would its successor, the moving image. What bears witness now? Does the arc of truth telling curve, does it bend to the first testimonies of our species — the drawn, the inscribed, and the symbolized? What are our testimonies, and what is it we affirm? Are our certainties just circles of rationalizing, restless half-truths, vivid imaginings, and cynical manipulations? Or can we ask where the smallest form can speak to larger testaments — drawn declarations, circles, a handprint as witness on a cave wall?¹⁰² Every mark we read or see was made to bear witness to brief life and briefer designs. Every text, then, is a testimony, not necessarily of truth, but illuminating of time, ideas, of the facts and falsities of place and moment.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 53.

The ghost and the darkness

Loss of mythos, of knowledge of the natural, of the cosmological, ‘voidness’ and imagined worlds. to speak of nature beyond the physical and precarious, not ascribing to it a neo-spiritualist mysticism. We once thought of nature in the realm of imagination, idiosyncrasy, and idiom.¹²⁰ Finding meaning, significance, purpose, and place of oneself in a life amongst the animated, non-animate, intimated, and intuited. Soft appearances of well-intentioned apparitions, wisdom, navigation. Soft pools of darkness, unknowingness not to be feared.

Jane Wildgoose says to me that objects hold dead things that come back to life only when strangers encounter them. So, Steven van Impe finds Victor Hugo’s letters in a lost book. Jane again, speaking of books as tombs of the unread. But then Ilenia Maschietto shows me her favourite old books of prediction and fortune-telling, once banned, now cheerfully outliving their proscribers. Jane now channels Proust, reciting ‘all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile’¹²¹

120 First in 2007, then again in 2015, new editions of The Oxford Junior Dictionaryhave been removing words relating to the natural world, words like ‘acorn’, ‘cauliflower’, ‘dandelion’, ‘otter’, ‘magpie’, ‘leopard’, and ‘raven’, and replacing them with words of the virtual: ‘analogue’, ‘blog’, ‘chatroom’ (the last two already on their wayto being obsolete). See Alison Flood, ‘Oxford Junior Dictionary’s Replacement of “Natural” Words with 21st-Century Terms Sparks Outcry’, Guardian, 13 January 2015, https://www.theguardian. com/books/2015/jan/13/ oxford-junior-dictionary- replacement-natural-words.

121 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C K Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, New York: Vintage International, 2015, 47.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 69.

The disappeared

The ultimate library of humankind must be a large, empty space, punctuated by pinpricks. Dots of book light, random dashes, broken lines in the long trajectories of human story. More void than Borges’s version. Lost, destroyed, or unrecorded, our libraries are paltry pickings, leftovers from the prolific output of millennia of writing.

When we think of the lack of community, of the lonely tightrope walk of our lives, we race to fill our unquietness with clamour, screens, and chatter. When we allude to the emptiness of disconnect, we rarely acknowledge that it is community that is missing. The banishment and vanishing of community, the deliberate and specific nuclearization of social units, have reduced our social voices to relationships of transaction. That are always, always measured in productivity and outcomes. As our actual circles shrink, so do the stories we hear, now viral, not varied. As our economic and social systems continue to bias towards corporation over community, nonurban voices are silenced by the suppression of grassroots struggle and intellectual activism. Disappeared journalists, students, and Indigenous and environmental activists, targeted by paramilitary forces or subjected to extrajudicial torture, imprisonment, and execution. The people of press, publishing, academia, activism. Silencing, erasing, vanishing, banishing.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 71.

We humans are pack-rats when it comes to information, we squirrel away as much as we can, willy-nilly, sometimes haphazardly, employing a system or discipline of mind or order that is of our devising. We are also as destructive as the vermin. Natural entropy and rot take their toll of course, as do flood, fire, pest and pestilence. Still, the biggest enemies of books en masse are less the poor bookworm and more our wilful actions.

We are impoverished. We are a fraction of ourselves. We know a millionth of that fraction. And still we burn. The concept of a hell as afterlife is a redundancy, a pathetically weak imagining. Neither our heavens (in their teeth-aching tedium of never-ending sweetness, a ghastly fate) nor our hells, can hold a candle to what we can make, and what we can destroy here, in our time. Burning herbals and witches,²⁶⁰ books and people alive for perceived blasphemies or heresies, for speaking in another tongue, or belonging to another ethnic or faith-group, still has currency. Some see the conflagration of culture as the birth of their own, from Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities, the Nazis swearing fire-oaths around bonfires of books, or the extremists who burn libraries (even those of their own culture and religion), but some like the Inquisition and IS burn their hostages. The auto-da-fé doesn’t seem to be consigned to the ethical infancy of our species, and till it is, language, oral, print or online, will continue to be contested fields.

And so this is a poor list, a paltry polemic about circular time, the trundling wheel rising, falling, turning, crushing, grinding, all in the same wretched ruts of hate, mistrust, power and greed, driven by Bronze-age superstition and medieval thinking – the hemoclysm,²⁶¹ and modern demagoguery of ideological horror- utopias. This list should end here, but it will not. It does not belong to our past, it is present, it is continuous, it is the charred carbon on which we continue to write our similar histories.

260 As I write this, ISIS has began executing women suspected of witchcraft.

261 Coined by Matthew White, the term is used in the context of the violent and bloody era of both World Wars in the twentieth-century. An era that, as White put it, will be considered by ‘future historians … to be mere episodes of a single massive upheaval that took the lives of some 155 million people.’ This single hemoclysm includes the duration from the fall of the Manchu regime in 1911, to the events of the Cultural Revolution (second only to WWII in terms of casualties, China losing some 75 million lives over 65 years), Stalin’s tyranny, the horrors of the Belgian genocide in the Congo, the Partition of the Indian sub-continent, right up to the continuing extinction of the Amazonian Indians. See Matthew White, Atrocities: The 100 deadliest episodes in human history, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 227.

The only sure knowledge I seem to have is of being constantly aware of the perilousness of our futures, and more importantly, the future of this planet. But this is not a fearful or lonely way to live, because after all, so many of us share this knowledge. To me, this provides us with the necessary kick in the pants, it is the urgency behind pushing for necessary change — for more parity between people and communities, and an end to the rapaciousness we have allowed to dominate our interactions with each other and with the planet. This knowledge is vital, this knowledge is a call to action, and yet it is so easily absented from our daily existences, from the media, from governance, and from our stories. We are the book, this is the banishment, and we know what we must do.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 350.

Muzzle the dissidents,
tear down the Tower of Ivory
whip incontinent history into shape
Get with the pogrom

Kill the Elephant again,
And the bookworm,
who will turn like the worm
in your apple
Your apple-cheeked patriotic pride

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 229.

The open, the air

The library is open, the library is air. This is not a facile, vacuous attempt at quasi-poetics. The open/air is where our young find self-determinism and freedom. There is a reason Snowden (who found his intellectual and moral self online) became its champion. It is also where we can be as easily rendered unfree. There is a reason that the only safe transaction of information can happen in the gaps. The printed page, the codex, the samizdat — these remain the most effective air-gaps, as they have throughout history. In a post-Snowden and post-WikiLeaks world, the book quietly holds its own, and it holds in secret its conversation with the reader.⁹⁵

Open access is the clarion call of every library that can afford it, and as they rush to digitize, we find the physical collection vanishing. The book, digitized, is only information. Closed, it is an artefact, a historical and personal document, a hushed tomb, yes, but of breathless promise that comes alive when opened. Open and online, it is worthless. To scan a book effectively, you must slice its spine, break its back, unpick its binding, unmake it into separate pulpable sheets, and flatten its text into a poor image, a pale shadow.

95 Thanks in no small part, in 2005 and 2006, to the refusal of US librarians to turn over borrower records under the Patriot Act. See Eric Lichtblau, ‘F.B.I., Using Patriot Act, Demands Library’s Records’, New York Times, 26 August 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/politics/fbi-using-patriotact-demands-librarys-records.html.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 45.

Drug them then, with the opiate of your choosing
Voices congregated
In unison
The thrall of the horde
Singular purpose
Singular ends
From singular means
Towards a singular extinction

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 230.

Burn all the books
No phoenix can rise
from these ashes
No literature,
when these fictions serve us better

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 230.

Get some land, some people
or, get some land from some people
Some laws, some guns
to teach the people the importance of obeying
the laws and the guns

Then sweep the Stables,
Kill the Behemoth
of tiresome historicity
Kill Conscience,
the Elephant in the room

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 229.

The exponential

Every library is unlimited, in that the movement of information between texts (in books and in heads) is triggered with every encounter. The infinite textual sea of Borges’s Library may perhaps be best appreciated in the online encounters of rapidly and incessantly moving information and meaning. It is here (or there) that we find (lose) meaning (non-meaning), preserve (erase), clarify (confound), liberate (control), and (or) render (randomize) information (junk) as patterns, networks, and symbolic meaning-generation. This wonder (madness) can be glimpsed on Wikipedia, for instance. More than an archive or repository, it is the perfect (perpetually incomplete) encyclopaedia,⁸⁸ and by its very constant state of flux, it is the anti-encyclopaedia. There are 120 edits per minute,⁸⁹ and thus it constantly whittles even as it propagates. As I write this, the English Wikipedia⁹⁰ stands at the equivalent of 3018 print volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.⁹¹ This has been seen as a provocation by some, who have wanted to print and bind it all, in an exercise that would be stunning in its profligacy of material and redundancy of vision. But every encyclopaedia is marginalia, always instantly obsolete, and when it is mutable and idealistic (like Wikipedia), it loses rigour and academic authority, and so is no longer an encyclopaedia

If you still wish to wander the impossibility of Borges’s Library, it is in this⁹²(non-)world that you can find it, where it has been (is being) built in all its hexagonal, insane glory. And when you find yourself ‘constantly thwarted looking for meaning among the library’s babble’, you are advised to see your navigation as ‘a form of meditation’. Eventually, the site offers, ‘your mind learns no longer to search for or expect significance’.⁹³ This is the true library, where we are to be unhooked from our favourite drug⁹⁴ and float free.

89 Wikipedia, s.v. “Wikipedia:Statistics,” last modified 24 January 2022, 20:02, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics.

91 Wikipedia, s.v. “Wikipedia:Size in volumes,” last modified 16 January 2022, 01:05, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: Size_in_volumes.

92 Jonathan Basile, Library of Babel (website), accessed 9 June 2015, https://libraryofbabel.info.

93 Jonathan Basile, ‘Reference Hex’, Library of Babel (website), accessed 9 June 2015, https://libraryofbabel.info/referencehex.html.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 43.

The unseen

Borges spoke of his blindness as a ‘luminous mist’ that obfuscated and rendered opaque the distractions and trivialities of sighted life, and allowed a grateful retreat into the true singular eye of the mind.¹¹⁹ This sharpening of the intellectual lens is evident in his method — which can be argued was more nineteenth than twentieth century — and in the way he pared down his characters. They exist as texts and fictionalities, not personalities. Ireneo Funes is the Library, the archive, the repository, and being singular, is also the Tower. He is all this but he is not a man. We know this even as we marvel, envy, and ultimately pity him.

119 Albin Krebs and Robert McG Thomas, ‘Notes on People; Borges Visits South, Fulfillinga Dream’, New York Times, 22 January 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/22/nyregion/notes-on-people-borges-visits-south-fulfilling-a-dream.html.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 67.

The unread

Every vast library, public, private, lost, or extant, is full of the unread. There are books printed en masse now for window dressing and display, or as a plinth, and then they are pulped. Giant warehouses are built to accommodate the unread, the undead matter of our disregard. A salt mine¹¹⁴ in Cheshire, giant facilities in Swindon and West Yorkshire — these industrial spaces, enormous storehouses of unread, unasked-for books¹¹⁵ — are far removed from the warm wood of the Bodleian and the bustle of the British Library.¹¹⁶ Even the more modest stacks of a library are homes to the lost. In the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp, curator Steven van Impe stands between shelves of over a million¹¹⁷uniformly jacketed books,¹¹⁸ almost all unread. He tells me how if one were to be mis-shelved, it would be effectively lost, untraceable. Sometimes these ghosts shout at him to be picked up, despite the danger. Here, it is the read book that is at greater risk of disappearing.

115 See Maev Kennedy, ‘Solution or Disaster? Bodleian’s Plan For £29M Store Divides Oxford’, Guardian, 17 September 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/17/highereducation.books, and ‘Bodleian’s Book Storage Facility Celebrates 5th Anniversary and 1 Millionth Book Request’, Bodleian Libraries (website), 19 October 2015, https://www2. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oua/news/2015/oct-19.

116 From 2010 to 2011, the latter added 3 million items, or an estimate of almost 10 linear kilometres of shelf space.

117 See ‘Collection’, Erfgoed Hendrik Conscience (website), accessed 12 February 2022, https://consciencebibliotheek.be/index.php/en/page/collection-0.

118 Most libraries now encase their rare and old books in acid-free paper boxes and jackets.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 63.

Tom Stoppard suggests that when we forget a book we’ve read, it is no better than an unread one. That would be true if reading a book and remembering or recalling the information is the only desired objective. It may be that the diffusion is secondary, important but nevertheless secondary, simply because books do a pretty poor job as complete transmitters and would certainly not have the power they do, partly because the blandly obvious in simply uninteresting. Our brains would rather imaginatively fill in the blanks, inaccurately populate the gaps. Still, even as a bare text, a book will have an effect on us, whether incremental or cascading, unconscious or revelatory — the degree of this is, again, secondary. What is disregarded here is what reading a book does. As a physical object, it bears the marks of our indiscretions with it — dog-ears, a cracked spine, roughening around the edges … and so do we. We are shaped objects, filed down to certainties; sometimes we have preexisting certainties eroded, or buried under accumulated word-fall, sometimes our strata are eroded and our bedrock is laid bare. And then we must reread, rethink, and reinvent new illusions/delusions. Sometimes we resist, shore up our defences; sometimes we allow the words of another to make landfall, to take that beachhead and make rapid inroads into our delighting minds and sensibilities.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 63, 65.

What, then, is the future of the library, or any such storehouse of knowledge? I venture that the survival and robustness of the archive will come as we understand the critical value of the decentred library, one that may be physical, digital, memorial, activist, or arena- or community-centred, but alive and activated.⁸⁷ I retain the conviction that it is only through the inclusion of the nonhuman, and the decolonizing and decentring of the catalogue that we can imagine the library as a future commons, and one that begins from the communities it serves, not held hostage by conditional budgets and nationalist concerns. The future of the library lies not in calcification of collections, but in recognizing the vastness of diverse linguistic heritages, legacies, and contemporary work, and in becoming a powerful device to resist the treacherous rhetoric of purity and supremacy. The library, then, is non-eternal, but it is plural, and Everywhere.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 39-40.

The regurgitated

… or revisiting ideas, this chapter being one such example. From revisiting positions, declarations of unanimity that should be reappraised, to re-entering locations, spots of sorrow, poking a painful tooth, expunging the ghosts of sites of trauma, revisiting sites of joy.

Sometimes it is the old made new, again, (self-)referential texts, self-plagiarism, internal monologues, circular dialogues, rehashed arguments, and decontextualized, weaponized quoted passages, press-ganged into service to admonish, diminish, dismiss, and then appropriate what survives from the ridiculed and disdained. questions of appropriation, the reinvented, the stolen, the homage, legacy, and the craven fawning over those anointed, canonized, perpetual, prickly points of comparison.

Drink deep, the dregs. An auction of a bankrupted estate, sold for parts, scrap, Jasper Fforde’s textual sea. Unmade, unpicked, picked over, scrapped-heaped, discards, conversational dandruff falling about our ears.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 51.

The unread

Every vast library, public, private, lost, or extant, is full of the unread. There are books printed en masse now for window dressing and display, or as a plinth, and then they are pulped. Giant warehouses are built to accommodate the unread, the undead matter of our disregard. A salt mine¹¹⁴ in Cheshire, giant facilities in Swindon and West Yorkshire — these industrial spaces, enormous storehouses of unread, unasked-for books¹¹⁵ — are far removed from the warm wood of the Bodleian and the bustle of the British Library.¹¹⁶ Even the more modest stacks of a library are homes to the lost. In the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp, curator Steven van Impe stands between shelves of over a million¹¹⁷uniformly jacketed books,¹¹⁸ almost all unread. He tells me how if one were to be mis-shelved, it would be effectively lost, untraceable. Sometimes these ghosts shout at him to be picked up, despite the danger. Here, it is the read book that is at greater risk of disappearing.

115 See Maev Kennedy, ‘Solution or Disaster? Bodleian’s Plan For £29M Store Divides Oxford’, Guardian, 17 September 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/17/highereducation.books, and ‘Bodleian’s Book Storage Facility Celebrates 5th Anniversary and 1 Millionth Book Request’, Bodleian Libraries (website), 19 October 2015, https://www2.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/oua/news/2015/oct-19.

116 From 2010 to 2011, the latter added 3 million items, or an estimate of almost 10 linear kilometres of shelf space.

117 See ‘Collection’, Erfgoed Hendrik Conscience (website), accessed 12 February 2022, https://consciencebibliotheek.be/index.php/en/page/collection-0.

118 Most libraries now encase their rare and old books in acid-free paper boxes and jackets.

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 63.

Get some land, some people
or, get some land from some people
Some laws, some guns
to teach the people the importance of obeying
the laws and the guns

Then sweep the Stables,
Kill the Behemoth
of tiresome historicity
Kill Conscience,
the Elephant in the room

—Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2016, 229.

— Shubigi Rao, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Volume I of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 77.

— Shubigi Rao, Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book, Volume III of V, Singapore: Rock Paper Fire, 2022, 152-153.

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To request for a copy of the book Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book:

Kindly fill in this request form

To order Volumes I and II of Pulp:

Books Kinokuniya Singapore

To contact the Artistic Team:

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For media queries:

Mary Ann Ng

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Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book

Shubigi Rao’s multidisciplinary practice critiques contemporary celebrations of ignorance and culling of knowledge. A glorious tribute and haunting elegy to shared humanity and communities of print, this exhibition marks the midpoint of her evocative 10-year project Pulp, which explores the history of book destruction and its impact on the futures of knowledge.

Based on an artistic method of solo travel and filming as well as building trust and kinship with people across the world, her work is a recovery of overlooked half-truths, hearsay, contested narratives and secrets. Such vital histories have often been deliberately obscured by those in power and by the expediencies of capital. When encountered here, the collected stories become seeds of knowledge that resist erasure and circumvent geopolitical and cultural divides.

Taking the form of a book, film, and paper maze, Pulp III explores the precarity of endangered languages, the futures of public and alternative libraries, the work of defenders of books, and the cosmopolitanism of regional print communities that have blossomed and waned in historic centres of print, such as Venice and Singapore.

Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book

Since 2014, Shubigi Rao has been filming public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. The project spans the creation of books to their destruction, the building of libraries to their burning, and the diverse threats to languages in embattled communities. Rao’s critically insightful, extensive, incisive and poetic work across Pulp explores the dichotomies of human stories and erasure. Her work unpeels the layered perspectives on inclusion and exclusion, the multitudinous philosophical natures of text, story, and archive, while examining the collisions between violent human impulse and survival and resistance.

The Singapore Pavilion in Venice

The Singapore Pavilion occupies 250 sqm in a complex of buildings called the Sale d’Armi, which is centrally located and easily accessible within the Arsenale, a key site in Venice. The Sale d’Armi complex is a cluster of four 16th-century barracks built with brick and stone, each with a wooden roof. It lies opposite the intersection between the long Corderie and Artiglierie buildings, where the main central square of the Arsenale is situated.

Commissioned by:

Supported by:

Notable press mentions in English

Toh, Wen Li. “Venice Biennale: Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III exhibition contains multitudes.” The Straits Times, May 23, 2022.

Interview with Shubigi Rao, CNA938 Singapore Today, May 20, 2022, audio, 9:28.

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Tsui, Enid. “Venice Biennale 2022: the 7 most interesting highlights from Asian pavilions at the international art exhibition.” South China Morning Post, May 5, 2022.

Chu, Chloe. “Shubigi Rao: Stories of Creation and Destruction.” ArtAsiaPacific, May 1, 2022.

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Yusof, Helmi. “The 12 best country pavilions at Venice Biennale.” The Business Times, April 28, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “Venice Biennale Arts 2022: Shubigi Rao’s Pulp takes centre stage at Singapore pavilion.” The Straits Times, April 26, 2022, video, 5:30.

Dozier, Ayanna. “The 10 Best National Pavilions at the Venice Biennale 2022.” Artsy, April 25, 2022.

Eastham, Ben. “59th Venice Biennale, The National Pavilions.” art-agenda, April 23, 2022.

“Singapore pavilion at Venice biennale showcases Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III.” Inside Recent, April 23, 2022.

“Arts & Culture: Singapore Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.” adobo magazine, April 22, 2022.

Luke, Ben, Louisa Buck, and Jane Morris. “The Week in Art: Venice Biennale special: four artist interviews, main show and a Bellini masterpiece.” The Art Newspaper, podcast audio, April 22, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “Inside the Singapore pavilion at Venice Biennale.” The Straits Times, April 22, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “Rao displays Pulp at Venice Biennale.” Tamil Murasu, April 22, 2022.

“Venice Biennale: Singapore spotlight.” The Business Times, April 21, 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet.

Toh, Wen Li. “Pulp Friction.” The Straits Times, April 21, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “Artist Shubigi Rao’s Pulp to take centre stage at Venice Biennale’s Singapore pavilion” The Straits Times, April 20, 2022.

Luke, Ben. “The best of the Venice Biennale: our critics’ review.” The Art Newspaper, April 20, 2022.

Yusof, Helmi. “In Venice, minimalist Singapore show speaks volumes.” The Business Times, April 20, 2022.

Fisher, Paul. “Singapore Pavilion to unveil Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III exhibition at Venice Biennale 2022.” The A List, April 19, 2022.

Chia, Adeline. “Horror and Hope: Shubigi Rao Documents the History of Book Destruction.” ArtReview, April 13, 2022.

Sutton, Kate. “Pulp Fiction: Kate Sutton on Shubigi Rao and her work at the 59th Venice Biennale.” Artforum International, April 1, 2022.

Thomas, Skye Arundhati. “4 Artists to watch 2022: Unwriting history’s binaries to reveal how institutional knowledge is made and kept. Shubigi Rao.” Frieze Magazine, No.226, April 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet – this is to PR firm’s google drive so will rather not depend on them as link could change, please also delete the rest of the file after page 91.

Hashimi, Hashirin Nurin. “Printed Matter.” Tatler Singapore, April, 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet.

Solari, Mattia. “Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book.” Exibart, April 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet – this is to PR firm’s google drive so will rather not depend on them as link could change.

Chia, Adeline. “What’s in a book?” ArtReview Asia, Spring 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet.

“‘I Think of Reading as Hallucinating Time’: Shubigi Rao on the Power of Books.” ArtReview, March 28, 2022.

“Artist Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III Explores the Book as a Vehicle for Resistance and Redemption.” ArtNews, March 24, 2022.

“Artist Shubigi Rao’s Pulp III Explores the Book as a Vehicle for Resistance and Redemption.” Flash News 11, March 24, 2022.

Moldan, Tessa. “Shubigi Rao Maps Linguistic Diversity at the Venice Biennale.” Ocula, March 10, 2022.

Lu, Yawen. “An all female team leads the 10th Singapore Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2022.” The Peak Magazine, February 24, 2022.

“Singapore pavilion explores disappearing cultures, book’s humanist soul.” The Daily Tribune, February 15, 2022.

“Shubigi Rao: Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book.” e-flux Announcement, January 30, 2022.

“Women-led artist-curator team to represent Singapore at Venice Biennale.” CNA Singapore Tonight, January 28, 2022.

“And yet the margins are where the underclass can thrive.” Manila Bulletin Online, January 22, 2022.

“Arts & Culture: Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book; Shubigi Rao in collaboration with curator Ute Meta Bauer.” Adobo Magazine, January 19, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “Singapore’s Venice Biennale exhibition features pulpy paper maze.” The Straits

Times, January 19, 2022.

Kale, Neha. “Author and artist Shubigi Rao.” The Saturday Paper, Nov 26, 2022.

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Teo, Elaine T. M. “A Conversation with Shubigi Rao and Ute Meta Bauer.” ArtSG, Sept 24, 2021.

Yusof, Helmi. “Singapore’s Printed World Heads For Venice Biennale 2022.” Female, August 12, 2021.

Yusof, Helmi. “Singapore’s printed world goes to Venice.” The Business Times, August 6, 2021.

Gaskin, Sam. “Shubigi Rao Will Represent Singapore at Venice Biennale in 2022.” Ocula Magazine, July 27, 2021.

Sim, Suining. “Singapore Sends First All-Women Creative Team to Venice Biennale.” ArtAsiaPacific, July 26, 2022.

Please download the file and host it under the same place as book and booklet.

“Multidisciplinary artist Shubigi Rao and curator Ute Meta Bauer to represent Singapore at the 59th International Venice Biennale.” e-flux Announcements, July 26, 2022.

Ingrasciotta, Carla. “Shubigi Rao and Ute Meta Bauer to represent Singapore at the 59th Venice Biennale.” MyArtGuides, July 26, 2022.

“Shubigi Rao to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale.” ArtReview, July 26, 2022.

Toh, Wen Li. “All-female art team to represent Singapore.” The Straits Times, July 26, 2021.

Toh, Wen Li. “Singapore sends first female artist-curator team to Venice Biennale.” The Straits Times, July 26, 2021.

Notable press mentions in other languages

“Biennale de Venise : l’exposition Pulp III de Shubigi Rao en contient des multitudes.” Look-Travels, May 23, 2022.

“Srbija uvrštena među 10 najboljih nacionalnih paviljona na Bijenalu u Veneciji 2022.” Espreso, April 28, 2022.

Rossi, Valentina and Marco Scotti. “Arcipelago Biennale: la traversata dei meglio padiglioni.”. Zero, April 28, 2022.

Ng, Siang Ping. “书不应被权力流放威尼斯双年展本地参展艺术家舒比吉·拉奥专访.” Lianhe Zaobao, April 25, 2022.

Berti, Luciana. “Quattro Padiglioni meno battuti ma da non perdere, all’Arsenale.” Exibart, April 23, 2022.

Zefkili, Despina. “Μπιενάλε Βενετίας: 7 εθνικά περίπτερα εκτός Giardini που τραβούν το ενδιαφέρον.” Athinorama Athens, April 22, 2022.

Ng, Siang Ping. “第10次参展由两女性担纲威尼斯双年展我国作品以毁书为题.” Lianhe Zaobao, April 22, 2022.

Lombardi, Laura. “Spirito condiviso all’Arsenale” Il Giornale Dell’Arte, April 21, 2022.

Ng, Siang Ping. “探索书籍销毁历史本地作品亮相威尼斯艺术双年展.” Lianhe Zaobao, April 21, 2022.

Sondermann, Simone. “Die Besten Länderpavillons Der Biennale.” Weltkunst, April 20, 2022.

“Pulp de l’artiste Shubigi Rao occupera le devant de la scène au pavillon de Singapour de la Biennale de Venise.” Look-Travels, April 20, 2022.

Girard, Robinette. “Le National Arts Council de Singapour présente l’artiste Shibigi Rao – ARTnews.com.” What’sNow, March 24, 2022.

“Svizzera e Singapore alla Biennale di Venezia: ecco i progetti dei Padiglioni.” Exibart, January 28, 2022.

Ng, Siang Ping. “本届威尼斯双年展新加坡馆纸迷宫展示书的流放.” Lianhe Zaobao, January 20, 2022.

Maida, Desirée. “Biennale Arte 2022. Shubigi Rao rappresenta il Singapore a Venezia.” Artribune, January 21, 2022.

“Biennale Arte 2022: Singapore punta su un team multidisciplinare per il suo Padiglione”. Exibart, July 30, 2021.

Andrews, Georgia. “Seniman multidisiplin Shobiji Rao dan kurator Otti Mita Bauer akan mewakili Singapura di Venice International Biennale ke-59.” PosPapua, July 26, 2022.

Ng, Siang Ping. “新加坡第一次两女性组合获委参加威尼斯双年展.” Lianhe Zaobao, July 26, 2022.

Visiting Information

Singapore Pavilion
Arsenale – Sale d’Armi, Campo della Tana 2169/F, 30122 Venice, Italy
23 April – 27 November 2022

Opening Hours
23 April to 25 September: 11am – 7pm (8pm on Fridays and Saturdays)
27 September to 27 November: 10 am – 6 pm
Closed on Mondays (except Monday 25 April, 30 May, 27 June, 25 July, 15 August, 5 September, 19 September, 31 October, 21 November)

About the Architect

Laura Miotto is an award-winning exhibition designer and educator. With 20 years of experience in the design field, both as creative director and architectural designer, Miotto has worked on permanent and temporary exhibitions, focusing on heritage interpretation and sensorial design strategies in the context of museums, thematic galleries and public spaces. Among her recent projects are the exhibitions The Posthuman City. Climates. Habitats. Environments. (2019) at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Guo Pei: Chinese Art and Couture (2019) at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum, the new Sarawak Museum in Malaysia; and the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore completed in 2015.

Miotto’s design of the paper maze made the Singapore Pavilion architecture come alive: approaching the Pavilion entrance, one steps between what appears to be sheets of paper holding us within its folds. Its layers unfold to reveal the architecture of a book, much like the enveloping that occurs in the act of reading.

About the Curator

Ute Meta Bauer is a curator of exhibitions and presentations that connect contemporary art, film, video and sound through transdisciplinary formats. Since October 2013 she has been Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, a research centre of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) where she is a full professor in the School of Art, Design and Media. At the Centre, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, most recently Non-Aligned (2020), featuring artists John Akomfrah, Naeem Mohaiemen and the Otolith Group, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films (2020/2021). From 2012 to 2013, she served as Dean of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Prior to that, she was Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was Founding Director of the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (2009–2012) and Director of the MIT Visual Arts Program (2005–2009). In 2015, she co- curated with Paul Ha, Director of MIT List Visual Arts Center, the US Pavilion at the 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, presenting eminent artist Joan Jonas. Bauer’s current research focus is on the climate crisis and cultural loss. She was an expedition leader of TBA21–Academy’s The Current (2015–2018), which explored the Pacific Archipelago and littorals most impacted by climate change and human interventions, and is the editor of Climates. Habitats. Environments., co-published by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore and MIT Press (2022). She is currently the curator for the 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022), together with David Teh and Amar Kanwar.

About the Artist

Shubigi Rao is an artist and writer whose fields of study include libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. Her art, texts, films and photographs look at current and historical flashpoints as perspectival shifts to examining contemporary crises of displacement, whether of people, languages, cultures, or knowledge bodies. Rao’s works have critically, poetically and wittily examined the systems of knowledge that structure our world. In 2008, she received her MA in Fine Arts from the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. Since 2014, she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally for her 10-year project titled Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. As an artist-in-residence at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, she released her first, eponymous book from the project in January 2016. It was shortlisted for the biennial Singapore Literature Prize 2018 (creative nonfiction). The second book, Pulp II: A Visual Bibliography of the Banished Book (2018), won the Singapore Literature Prize (creative nonfiction) in 2020. Both publications have clinched numerous awards including AIGA (New York)’s 50 best books of 2016 and 2018, and D&AD Pencil for design (2016, 2018). The first exhibition of the project, Written in the Margins, won the APB Signature Prize 2018 Jurors’ Choice Award. Rao has also been featured in the 10th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2021), March Meets (2019), 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), 10th Taipei Biennial, (2016), 3rd Pune Biennale (2017) and 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008). She is currently the curator for the upcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022.

Talk: Backstories on Talking Leaves and Pulp Vol. III