SHELVES - POÈMES FABULEUX
In the past decade, the sale of valuable books has increasingly shifted online, resulting in the closure of many antiquarian bookshops both in the Netherlands and worldwide. In 2023, shop owner Fred Duivenvoorde — aware of his age and the changing times — also decided to close his doors for good. As he puts it, “People will always find what they are searching for, as long as they enter the right keywords online. But the surprise of coming across something you were not looking for, that's the value of a shop like this.”
The closure of this single shop marks more than the end of a business; it symbolises a broader cultural shift. Physical spaces that once nurtured unplanned and tactile forms of discovery are gradually disappearing, replaced by algorithmically guided searches and digitised consumption.
Rather than documenting the shop as it once was, the project presents an artistic reinterpretation of its collection and atmosphere. A continuous process of (re)photographing, (re)interpreting and (re)printing onto pages from books that were otherwise destined to be discarded brings together photographs made inside the antiquarian bookshop with illustrations from the collection. Together, these fragments create unexpected encounters between image, text and material.
Like the eclectic collection of the antiquarian bookshop itself, Shelves -Poèmes Fabuleux invites readers to wander, make connections and discover meaning without a predetermined path.
A publication of this project will be released by The Eriskay Connection in the fall of 2026.
Help bring Poèmes Fabuleux into the world — discover the special editions and artworks HERE.
