Sadie Plant: Comment lire a bookshelf in einem Buch

What if the titles on a bookshelf were not just labels, but lines of a poem?

In Comment lire a bookshelf in einem Buch, Sadie Plant transforms a former telephone box on a railway platform in Biel/Bienne into a luminous cabinet of words. Books—found, donated, abandoned—are arranged not to be read in sequence, but to be read at a glance, their spines forming 20 short poems.

Photographs of these stacks are paired with Plant’s own text, reflecting on the work’s origins and the everyday poetry hiding in plain sight. What began as an installation about lost and found books becomes a new book in its own right—a layered meditation on reading, language, and chance encounters.

Sadie Plant, born in Birmingham, is the author of The Most Radical Gesture (1992), Writing on Drugs (1999), and Zeros + Ones (1997). She writes on art, technology, culture, and philosophy, and has taught at the Zürich University of the Arts and now at the Bern University of the Arts. She has lived in Biel/Bienne since 2012, working with local cultural institutions including Kunsthaus Pasquart and Krone Couronne.