Healing wounded words
By: Marina Salmaso
Contributors: Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Denmark]
Language: eng
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Loss (Psychology) in art; Healing in art; Graphic arts; Artists' books; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"The title expresses the intention of the work, although words are stronger than the sword - we need to heal the human wounds and loss"--Artist's statement from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

"Marina Salmaso is breaking patterns in a double sense, as an artist constantly challenging the limits between genre, creating new combinations, and as an individual leaving a Northern Italian petit bourgeois environment. Marina Salmaso has a fundamental graphic background, and many of her works hover within a graphic sphere - the production of artist books, stamps, and mail art, with many graphic effects. The works of Marina Salmaso are, to a certain extent, concerned about identity, nationality and boarders. You see this classic existentialism create the platform for the themes that she creates, and in many of the connexions she exhibits in. She is transgressive regarding norms, which insistently focus on the immediate, and she has a Fluxus attitude towards the art piece as a product"--The artist's website (viewed July 16, 2015).
Notes: On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.