The Windbook was installed at the National Library of Luxembourg from May 31, 2018 through May 31, 2019.
It sat outside, 24" wide and 18" tall, exposed to the elements, with only the wind to turn the pages. The work subverted human agency, running counter to the idea that people are in control. In a transgressive gesture, the project gave over to nature this symbol of human ingenuity and intellectual prowess.
I created this book in a workshop with students at the International School of Luxembourg. The students and I made images of people in the public squares of Luxembourg and recorded brief statements from the subjects about their lives. I wove this information into a series of narratives that extend the original information and sometimes combine multiple voices. As such they are fictions based in fact.
The book's 895 pages explore national identity and ethnicity in Luxembourg. It was a sad yet powerful coincidence that with the migrant crisis that came a few years later that this topic would be on everyone's lips.
The stories told by the subjects within the book are personal histories. And like any story of an individual, only portions of it are visible at any given moment. Our understanding of another person is always limited, always fractured and incomplete. On top of this, a person's history is present as long as people remember the individual. And then when that collective memory is no more that history disappears forever. And so the book enacts this same process. The pages turning in the breeze displaying bits and pieces of peoples' lives. Until after being weathered over the course of months the book fuses into a solid sculptural object, locking the stories inside.