PHOTOGRAPHY

An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street - A Call To Book Artists - From Beau Beausoleil

Help us reach 200 artists by 1st September 2011!

On March 5th 2007, a car bomb was exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic centre of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community.

The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition is issuing a call to book artists to work on a project to “re-assemble” some of the “inventory” of the reading material that was lost in the car bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street.

We are asking book artists to join our project and further enhance the work of the Coalition by honouring al-Mutanabbi Street, by creating work that holds both “memory and future,” exactly what was lost that day.

We ask that you create 3 books for the project, which is also raising funds for Médecins Sans Frontières. The books will tour venues alongside the Al-Mutanabbi Street broadsides from early 2012. A complete set of all the books will be donated to the Iraq National Library. An update on the broadsides tour is at: http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/mutan11.htm

If you would like to know more, or would like to join this project, please download the PDF for more information which is also on our newspage (http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/newsdata.htm), and if you have any questions please email
Sarah Bodman: Sarah.Bodman@uwe.ac.uk or Beau Beausoleil:  overlandbooks@earthlink.net
We would love to have you contribute to the project.

We have 167 artists on board, and will keep going with our call until the end of August…
Do join us. Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.