BOOK BOMBS is a collaboration between artists Mary Tasillo and Michelle Wilson.
BOOK BOMBS was originally conceived as an Independent Project of Philagrafika 2010 as a series of “bombings” – public installations of printed matter - in and around parks in Philadelphia. Since its inception, Book Bombs has continued to explore forms of political encounters, including participating in street art interventions with Axis Alley in Baltimore, MD, and Public Ad Campaign in Toronto, Canada; a recent street print bombing in San Francisco; and creating temporary creative communities amongst strangers through interactive projects.
BOOK BOMBS re-contextualizes public spaces, particularly park benches, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, drawing on the history of guerrilla art, graffiti traditions, and the artist multiple. Our site-based interventions highlight the social and environmental issues of a location, such as homelessness and endangered and invasive plants ecologies, through explorations of handmade paper, wheat pasted prints, and zines.
The project creates a narrative space that reveals the materiality of existence – the invisible city within a city that includes the homeless, the trees that grow on city streets, the metropolitan skyline, and everything in between, all part of the urban ecosystem. The artists make their own paper for their prints out of materials that embody the content of their imagery, such as old clothing and invasive plants harvested from abandoned spaces in Philadelphia and from the San Francisco Bay Area.
BOOK BOMBS Philagrafika programming culminated in the release of a zine, Rooted Within: a city in three movements. Like the prints, the zines were bombed in parks throughout Philadelphia, from Clark Park to Logan Circle to Washington Square to Palmer Park, and points in between. We released a second zine, We Walk Asking Questions, at the Friends of Dard Hunter Annual Meeting in October 2010 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
In 2011, Book Bombs released The Ethics of Wheatpaste as part of Amze Emmons's Refugee Reading Room at Space1026, as well as Hydrologies, a Minneapolis zine bomb. We followed with Horizontalidad, a response to the Occupy movement, and have been working on a Book Bombs Guide to Street Manners.
BOOK BOMBS was originally conceived as an Independent Project of Philagrafika 2010 as a series of “bombings” – public installations of printed matter - in and around parks in Philadelphia. Since its inception, Book Bombs has continued to explore forms of political encounters, including participating in street art interventions with Axis Alley in Baltimore, MD, and Public Ad Campaign in Toronto, Canada; a recent street print bombing in San Francisco; and creating temporary creative communities amongst strangers through interactive projects.
BOOK BOMBS re-contextualizes public spaces, particularly park benches, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, drawing on the history of guerrilla art, graffiti traditions, and the artist multiple. Our site-based interventions highlight the social and environmental issues of a location, such as homelessness and endangered and invasive plants ecologies, through explorations of handmade paper, wheat pasted prints, and zines.
The project creates a narrative space that reveals the materiality of existence – the invisible city within a city that includes the homeless, the trees that grow on city streets, the metropolitan skyline, and everything in between, all part of the urban ecosystem. The artists make their own paper for their prints out of materials that embody the content of their imagery, such as old clothing and invasive plants harvested from abandoned spaces in Philadelphia and from the San Francisco Bay Area.
BOOK BOMBS Philagrafika programming culminated in the release of a zine, Rooted Within: a city in three movements. Like the prints, the zines were bombed in parks throughout Philadelphia, from Clark Park to Logan Circle to Washington Square to Palmer Park, and points in between. We released a second zine, We Walk Asking Questions, at the Friends of Dard Hunter Annual Meeting in October 2010 in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
In 2011, Book Bombs released The Ethics of Wheatpaste as part of Amze Emmons's Refugee Reading Room at Space1026, as well as Hydrologies, a Minneapolis zine bomb. We followed with Horizontalidad, a response to the Occupy movement, and have been working on a Book Bombs Guide to Street Manners.