Created in collaboration with Michel Butor, the artist book J… brings together Butor’s poetic fragments and Jasmina Cibic’s collaged interventions into archival landscape photographs, forming a dialogue between language, image, and the politics of representation. Produced as a limited-edition livre d’artiste, the publication unfolds as a sequence of interrupted terrains in which poetry and landscape become mutually destabilising structures.
The book draws on Cibic’s long-term engagement with archives of photographic albums gifted to Josip Broz Tito by official state photographers during diplomatic visits across former Yugoslavia and the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. Originally commissioned to document sites of political hospitality and international encounter, these landscapes functioned as scenographic backdrops to a geopolitical project in formation. Stripped of their political protagonists, the images oscillate between documentary record and ideological construction, revealing landscape itself as a carefully staged political surface.
Into these photographs, Cibic inserts abstract cut forms and architectural incisions that fracture the image plane and reorganise the viewer’s movement through the page. Echoing modernist architectural vocabularies and spatial devices historically deployed in the service of state representation, these interventions destabilise the presumed neutrality of the landscape image, exposing the hidden mechanisms through which territory, identity, and political aspiration are framed and aestheticised.
Butor’s texts move through the publication as poetic apparitions—meditations on disappearance, tourism, catastrophe, desire, and memory—appearing alongside the landscapes as if emerging from within them. Rather than illustrating one another, text and image remain suspended in tension, producing shifting readings in which geography becomes psychological, and political space becomes speculative terrain. The fragmented compositions evoke both excavation and erasure: traces of histories partially visible yet perpetually slipping from fixed interpretation.
Throughout the book, Cibic’s collages operate not as acts of destruction but as secondary constructions—new spatial propositions layered onto historical documents. The interventions open the landscapes toward other possible readings, suggesting the fragile emergence of transnational imaginaries within the ideological infrastructures of the twentieth century. In this sense, J… reflects both artists’ shared interest in the instability of meaning and the capacity of fragments, interruptions, and poetic displacement to generate alternative ways of seeing political space.
Printed as an intimate and tactile object, the publication treats the page itself as a site of choreography, where image, language, and absence continuously negotiate one another.