Marielle Videler - Un libro para la biblioteca indigena La Sierra Nevada

Mariëlle Videler created the book with in her heart a special destination. It is a gift for a library in the coastal mountains, La Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, of Colombia. In 2016 she was artist in residence for a year at Flora ars + natura in Bogota, Colombia. Through many enchanting walks in the Andes Mountains from this concrete metropolis, she became impressed by the culture of some local communities. She also met Alicia Villafane, an Arhuaco woman. Who, a few years later, when she was working on 365 BIRDS, sent her a message saying that four local communities (Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa and Kankuamo) were building a large library in remote Simunurwa. Then Mariëlle Videler immediately thought: I would love to make a book for this library.

un libro para la biblioteca indígena La Sierra Nevada is a fist-thick book with a dark brown cover. It is made entirely of textile and has a large horizontal format. A visual and tactile landscape unfolds in the book. The compositions are formed with a selection of Videler's 365 BIRDS, 365 PLANTS and 365 INSECTS. To create layers with different shapes, lines and structures on the pages, she worked with three different cotton fabrics on which she combined lino printing with manual and especially digital embroidery. As with the BIRDS, PLANTS and INSECTS, she chose, based on the idea of the inner eye as described in Tao Te Ching, black and grey tones for the printing ink and embroidery thread. Only on the middle pages, for the floating, eternal circle, she used coloured thread.

When the book was finished, she tied it in a cloth, a furoshiki. The knotted cloth is printed with a magic realistic story; Leer el mundo, Het lezen van de wereld. Written at the invitation of Videler by Lucette ter Borg (translated to Spanish by Guillermo Briz Blanco).

In March 2025, Mariëlle Videler traveled to La Sierra Nevada in Colombia, and handed the book over to the spiritual leader of the Arhuacos at the library in Simunurwa. Based on this journey with her book she wrote a story about the project and her intentions. The story is published in the form of a small publication, graphic design Dee Vasilevskaia.

Link to the story > PDF