Title: An Authentic Relation
Artist: Marianne Bjørnmyr
Designer: Marianne Bjørnmyr
Editor: Marianne Bjørnmyr (artist)
Imprint: YONA Editions / Self Published
Printer: Livonia Print / Riga, Latvia
Publication date and place: August 2016 / Norway
Edition: 500
Format, binding: Soft cover, sown + bring fastened text
Size: 22×18 cm
Number of pages and images: 96 pp + 36 pp text / 53 images
Type of printing and paper: Offset printing on Munken Print Cream 15, 115 gsm + digital print on Cyclus offset 90 gsm.
Retail price: £ 34
Book Description: The book ‘An Authentic Relation’ is based on a diary found on the barren and desolate South-Atlantic island of Ascension in 1726. The diary was found to belong to the solider Leenert Hasenbosch, who one year earlier was left as a prisoner on the island as a punishment for sodomy. The diary contains detailed descriptions from the first day of his arrival until the last day of his life, six months later. The book was brought to England and has since been published in several versions; the story has through time been fabricated and twisted several times.
The work presents photographs from a journey undertaken by the artist to Ascension Island, accompanied with the original diary; a constellation of documentation, culminating in an overall feeling of distance and displacement, questioning our idea about history, not as fortified facts, but as possible fiction. Through the book, one navigates between text and images, forming an incomplete experience of the story – composed by the connections between photography, text and object but separated by history and time.
The images are being repeated throughout the book in obvious and less obvious ways; existing on their own and in an intertwining web of echoes and references, without being more then a reference to something that once was.
Book Soundtrack: