Marina Kassianidou

A Partial History

A Partial History is an ongoing project Kassianidou began in 2016. It involves recreating books from the collection of the artist’s late grandmother, Koralia. Most of these volumes are 19th and early 20th-century Greek school books that belonged to the artist’s grandmother, grandfather, great-uncle, and great-grandfather. Kassianidou “re-reads” each book as a material object rather than a text, focusing on marks of use and time: folds, creases, tears, stains, discolorations, and wormholes. For each book, the artist meticulously traces around these marks by hand, one page at a time, and then scans, prints, and binds the drawings into a new book containing only the excavated marks. The recreated books become archives of lines that suggest languages and narratives of time, touch, embodiment, and distributed agency. The resulting works are alternative “history” books, recording the history of handling each original book, including the history of the artist’s own touch.

website
instagram
A Partial History (Book 3) (digital artist’s book)