For the exhibition “Second Hand Stories”, we were asked to stage an intervention in a second-hand shop. We were stunned by the enormous amount of old books that had ended up in this thrift shop in Amsterdam. Many of these books had been discarded unsold, either because they were out of date or too much to store.

We realised that there were indeed too many books for us to judge what they contained. So we decided to use them as raw material to build a house structure. The shape is inspired by archaeological books that we often found among the old books. It can be used as a reading corner, but also as a place to contemplate all the things that used to have meaning and are now forgotten – a general memorial to thought and knowledge.

Co-production with Katja van Driel.