Book Bombs
BOOK BOMBS is a collaboration between artists Mary Tasillo and Michelle Wilson.
BOOK BOMBS was originally conceived as an Independent Project of Philagrafika 2010 as a series of “bombings” – public installations of printed matter - in and around parks in Philadelphia. Since its inception, Book Bombs has continued to explore forms of political encounters, including participating in street art interventions such as Axis Alley in Baltimore, MD, and Public Ad Campaigns in Toronto, Canada, and in Madrid, Spain; creating temporary creative communities amongst strangers through interactive projects.
BOOK BOMBS re-contextualizes public spaces, particularly park benches, empty lots, and abandoned buildings, drawing on the history of guerrilla art, graffiti traditions, and the artist multiple. Our site-based interventions highlight the social and environmental issues of a location, such as homelessness and endangered and invasive plant ecologies, through explorations of handmade paper, wheat pasted prints, and zines.
The project creates a narrative space that reveals the materiality of existence – the invisible city within a city that includes the homeless, the trees that grow on city streets, the metropolitan skyline, and everything in between, all part of the urban ecosystem. The artists make their own paper for their prints out of materials that embody the content of their imagery, such as old clothing and invasive plants harvested from abandoned spaces in Philadelphia and from the San Francisco Bay Area.
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