Ausreißer


Ausreißer is a project about the stories that emerge when books circulate beyond institutions and into the everyday life of a city. Working with Berlin’s open bookcases, informal public libraries where anyone can take or leave a book, the work explores how communal exchange and material traces inscribe unexpected narratives.

The starting point was not the books’ content alone but their lived histories: underlined passages, marginal notes, dedications, coffee stains, and other physical interruptions that reveal how previous readers engaged with them. These marks were gathered and reassembled into a series of hand-bound booklets. In this new form, disparate elements collide to produce new constellations of meaning. 

The booklets themselves echo the logic of the bookcases: unpredictable assemblages where one never knows what might surface next. By returning the finished volumes to the bookcases, the project re-enters the cycle of exchange, allowing others to encounter, reinterpret, or overwrite the fragments in turn.