BEYOND BORDERS

Isabel Miquel Arqués
BEYOND BORDERS

Photographs: Isabel Miquel Arqués

Text: Karen Blixen

Publisher: Ludion

168 pages

Year: 2022

ISBN: 978-94-9303-969-8

Price: 40 €

Comments: Softcover, 31 x 23,5 cm, b&w and color photographs. First edition. In very good condition, other than some creases around the top of the spine and some light dark marks on the front and back cover.

As a Spanish artist living for sixteen years in Antwerp, I have always been fascinated by how the Belgian and Flemish art scene has succeeded in maintaining its very strong sense of identity while embracing all kinds of artistic influences. There is no doubt that this Belgian Dositioning of crossroads cultures has inspired me in m approach to these artistic dialogues with female artists. These dialogues are like overlapping paths between art disciplines - beyond classification, beyond geographical borders, and beyond time.

The starting point is my own crossroads, using image and text in diverse forms, from photography to serigraphy. from prose and poetry to quotations. All these elements aim to channel my connection with the artists selected for the first series: Karen Blixen, Virginia Wolff and Georgia O'Keeffe. Writers, painters, fascinating personalities, all women following very different paths in their accomplishments.

As this is a form of storytelling, I decided to start with a storyteller, the Danish author Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen (1885-1962).

I was invited to visit Karen Blixen's home and museum, Rungstedlund (Denmark), on several occasions and was given the opportunity to rediscover it on my own when it was closed to the public. I photographed her 'everyday objects' - things that formed part of her daily routine and physical reality - while building in my mind a parallel story, my story, where Blixen's universe and mine converge.

Taking an image of the living-room carpet sent me far away. I saw not a carpet but a road map, a starting point and a destination, crossroads and side paths, a lifespan. In other pieces I saw Karen Blixen's travels, the countries she visited, seas and landscapes.

This book will follow that pattern, where the carpet and other objects I photographed - such as the bottom of a flower vase - will lead to a second, new image, born of my perception and interpretation of seeing what has been used, touched, smelled, moved and seen.

Karen Blixen's universe has been revealed through a whole year of visits to, reflections on. and encounters in the museum at Rungstedlund, as well as via meetings and updates on the constant evolution of the project with Catherine Lefebvre - director of the Karen Blixen Museum from 2009 to 2019 and, currently, Head of the Danish-Swedish Culture Foundation - and with the American writer and critic Judith Thurman, author of the essential Karen Blixen biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller.

- After Isabel Miquel Arqués' introduction