‘BAZ Recipe Book’ is an open publication looking at the library as a source of bewildering recipes – those that make us try new ‘dishes’ of life, rather than sticking to the well-proven ones. We spent a month in the Bibliothek Andreas Züst, ‘cooking things up’ – browsing the numerous books in search of recipes that would never come to our mind otherwise:
How to identify a ‘difficult’ cloud?
How to become deliberately available and unavailable?
How to toot your horn?
How to digest the wisdom of the idiots?
These and many other bizarre recipes opened a stage for the discussion and raised the question of certainty and doubt. Are the recipes found in books precise enough to stick to them? Should one believe in everything if it’s written in a book? Do we come to a library to look for answers? Or to find questions?
As we spent days in the library we observed its visitors as well. It seemed that many of them found themselves in the library almost by chance, with no particular plan or task in mind. Similarly to us they were aimlessly browsing through the beautiful books. We thought of ways to give this browsing some purpose or at least some prompts. Inside the books we hid the bookmarks to mark the pages containing the unexpected recipes and encourage the visitors to bookmark their own findings as well.
Although the collection of the library is finite and limited by the date of the untimely passing of its owner, the unexpected recipes that one can find in the books – are potentially infinite and invite the readers for a perpetual continuation of the library’s life.
Text: Olya Korsun, Gatis Murnieks
November 2023