LAZYBONES
Ruth van Beek

"Lazybones" is a work that lingers between a book and a collage. In collaboration with RVB Books, Ruth van Beek has made 20 unique leporello books. Each book hosts a collection of images from her archive, always set in different constellations. She inserted each image without glue on the page, by making small incisions through the surface of the paper. A similar method that was used in old photo albums.

These handmade books give a body to hundreds of seemingly useless small photos that linger in Ruth’s archive. Collected and cut out from old books and magazines over a period of many years, these images were meant to inform and instruct on the one hand and to distract and dream away on the other. Brought together in a new position and context, both as objects and representations, they form an incantation, they are fixed and irrevocably connected to each other.

The elongated format of the leporello and the content of the photos both refer to a visual language that we know from daily life and history. Sequences are used to instruct us, to tell stories, sing songs and cast magic spells. The pink shape refers to a body, a leg, a bone, the bowels. The images are inside, they represent the inner life and the capillaries of the archive. The lazy, meaningless, negligible photos are given the leading role in this book. And now, treated with care, they invite us to look again.