Holding this stack of papers entitled ‘Open-Ended Visions of Possibilities’, you know you have a very exciting object in your hands. This composition of works by patricia kaersenhout invites the reader/viewer to interact. The decision to bind the book using only a piece of red elastic stretched unattached over the fold in the pages, means that the choice of whether this book is bound or not, lies with you, the reader.
This decision for (almost) loose pages is taken further by then using conventional, sequential page numbering, with left- and right-hand pages that relate to one another. In fact, the picture editing is geared to this sequence of pages through continuous images and visual rhyming. But you can disassemble this well-thought-out sequence of content: it is possible to uncouple images from their counterparts and abruptly break up the texts – simply by removing the elastic band from the book and shuffling the sheets. So the makers give us the freedom to relate to the themes in a highly personal way; while at the same time passing on a sense of responsibility – after all, breaking with the norm is never without consequences.
Thanks to the multiplicity of (types of) images, the book has a playfully hectic character, to which the choice of materials convincingly adds. No less than fourteen different types of paper are used; furthermore, neither image nor text seem to have any special relationship to their physical bearer, switching casually from coated to uncoated paper (for example).
All things considered, the makers have found a form within which the work of patricia kaersenhout (which operates at the intersections of Black feminism, scratching through archives and historical silences) is presented in both a rigid and an open form, and which succeeds in bringing about an encounter.