Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. Vol I: Written in the Margins

Written in the Margins represents the first complete portion of Shubigi Rao’s ongoing project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book. Pulp examines issues surrounding the destruction of books and libraries, and its first volume sees Rao interviewing individuals and researching sites in Europe connected
to contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon. She is also writing several books on the topic, with the first, included in the present work, published two years ago.

Margins is designed as an interactive installation. A series of video interviews is indexed by a handmade card catalogue; the footage features a range of testimonies, from those of firefighters who tried to save the burning national library in Sarajevo during the Yugoslavian troubles of the 1990s, to a lector employed to preserve the purity of the Croatian language by expunging all Serbian and Russian words from Croatian national television. One interviewee speaks of her weekly protest outside the rebuilt Sarajevo city hall, which no longer houses the library, whilst another testifies to the efforts of cultural workers who, during the siege of Sarajevo, saved books and paintings by smuggling them out. Other components of the installation include photographs, books, texts, ink drawings, as well a conceptual guide to the project visualised as a phytogenetic tree – a taxonomic mind map of the work’s thematic contours and classifications.
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Shubigi Rao (b. 1975, Mumbai, India) is a Singaporean artist and writer. She works in decade-long stretches on linked ideas, and made her books and artwork from 2003 to 2013 under her male pseudonym, S. Raoul. Her current ten-year project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (2014–2024), has, in the works, a film, five books and ink-and-paper works about the history of book destruction and the book as activism and resistance. She recently held a solo exhibition in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017), and has participated in notable group shows worldwide, including the 3rd Pune Biennale, India (2017), 10th Taipei Biennale (2016), Singapore Writers Festival (2013, 2016) and 2nd Singapore Biennale (2008). She has been awarded residencies in India (2017), Berlin (2016) and Singapore (2015), and is a part-time lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.