Gathering words, thoughts, and narratives behind the making of an artwork, an object, a book, an exhibition, or an architectural project, the three new titles in the Notebooks/Spoken Word Gallery series focus on the work of writer/curator Rodrigo Ortíz Monasterio, writer Catherine Lacey, and poet Luis Felipe Fabre—who, in different and overlapping ways, engage with the idea of space as both a concrete and a highly personal cultural entity. As with other volumes in the series, the publications feature the processes of developing a project or an idea through the material and fragments that are often invisible in the final result.

Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio is a writer, curator, and founder of the independent publisher Guayaba Press, based in Mexico City. He has received a master’s degree in curatorial practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His practice focuses mainly on the expressions of modernism in Latin America, especially in relation to artists’ books and publications on architecture and archives.

With bilingual editions and a specific focus on translation, Juan de la Cosa / John of the Thing explores the line separating literary works and the experimental writings put forward by visual artists, publishing authors that imagine new and ambiguous spaces for fiction and that test the limits of narrative and poetic writings.