Tiago Torres-Campos
that those constellations are highly influenced by the physical space that organises them. Like all libraries, ours too has a system, albeit unconventional: novels can be paired with art catalogues if, for example, they refer to a same period, or to a same author, or to a same line of study that my father happened to be exploring at the time. Sometimes, small art pieces or memorabilia stand side by side with relevant publications — a long photograph in sepia taken by my great- grandfather during a military campaign in Africa alongside a series of books inherited from his collection. An old book hand-written by an Amazon tribal chief, alongside a pair of drawings of macaws from the same region. Unlike most libraries, however, books do not always occupy the same place on the bookcases. The whole system has always been in constant flux, not from just my father but from all of us. Whenever I needed a book for a school project, it was moved into a lower shelf, so I could access it in my own terms.
to new environments, the heat and the monsoon, the sweat, the thirst and the fatigue. Vibrant cross-examinations of previous expeditions that were always already entangled in the beginning of the next one. One of my parents’ motivations for moving into a larger house, besides a growing family, was the study room. Connected to the main living room through a sliding door, the space is independent enough to organise and secure the books, catalogues, albums and magazines that fill the recessed floor-to-ceiling shelves on all walls except the fireplace. We call it the library, and that small stuffed space was the entry point to a much richer, weirder and cosmopolitan world than my sheltered youth in a Catholic school could anticipate. It is also where I became conscious that books contain organised thoughts and images, that they too are assembled in wider collections with other books, and
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