Transversal is much more than a book. It is a collector’s object. This bilingual book brings together the proposals submitted to the Transversal competition of BIACS3-YOUniverse (the 3rd Seville Biennial of Contemporary Art).
The publication had to gather all the documentation and paratexts of the proposals by contemporary artists who took part in this showcase, which opened the Seville Biennial of Contemporary Art to creators wishing to make the city of Seville their workspace.
The proposals set out a route of interventions across 5 sites in the city. The itinerary formed by the sequence of these works followed the west–east axis that crosses Seville’s historic centre. We decided to carry this transversal urban route into the structure of the book as the narrative thread of its storytelling. The chapters are organised as places for reflection, showing how these everyday spaces can be transformed into extraordinary ones. But we did not want to stop there: we chose to make transversality explicit by turning the publication itself into a book-object that explores how transversality can take physical form. This physical quality becomes paper and flesh in its cover, an aggregation of five covers pierced by the silhouettes of the sites involved, façades and courtyards at the same scale and oriented according to the map of Seville. In this way, an editorial project became a meta-object that not only documents the artistic proposal but becomes part of it.
