Library Salons

Posted July 17, 2014 by Nik Gaffney

In the spring we started hosting library salons, which have seen a diverse and highly entertaining crowd who never failed to surprise in their selection of reading matter. The salons are low-key public events where each of us choose a passage to read from one of the books in our library. While some of us carefully prepare our readings beforehand, others read out from a book chosen on the spur of the moment.

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The unplanned connections and parallels that emerged from the reading lists of these salons might be seen to represent informal serendipitous study groups on life, the universe and everything in-between. You can see in photographic realism the high drama of us reading, and evidence of what we read, here and here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/14274488805/in/set-72157644442495660

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We are looking forward to our next salon in September, when we welcome Rebecca Conroy of The Librarium. Rebecca is friend and collaborator of Ali Crosby and Leah Simpson (both previously in residence) all of whom are involved in the curiously-named initiative “Artists with Library Tendencies”. Meanwhile our own library, as a paper repository of unique fragments and tomes with digital traces online, has been periodically brought back from the brink of uncatalogued chaos thanks to the work of Jura De Wel, FoAM’s unparalleled library assistant.

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