Based on the cross-over between sound and image, BOOKSCAPES documents a journey across Mexico through a series of short recordings of a blank book made in various locations. The idea of bookscapes, formed by the combination of words book and landscape, was born in response to the practice developed by composer Murray Schafer to study the acoustic environment of various contexts (soundscapes). The bookscapes incorporate into the sound recording the visual element of such environment, which is reflected into the blank pages of an open volume.
Through this process, an expanded sense of reading emerges, unsettling the established forms of a practice that usually contemplates the literary and visual material rather than the sonorous component, which in this case becomes a central part of the reading experience, responding to a certain place where the context in which the reader is located provides and creates the narrative.
The blank page is an invitation to listen, rather than to see; it outlines a form of expanded literature where the reader participates as an active listener, in search of a book always open to another time and another space.

This publication is a companion to the installation Tolle Lege, Tolle Lege! (Take up and Read) —first exhibited within the Loop Festival Barcelona City Screen 2019 at Miscelanea, Barcelona.