SANDWICH LIBRARY came into being to provide access for artists, curators, and art enthusiasts, especially young and less well-off ones, with a way to stay in touch with the state of global art commentary and to facilitate larger-scale reach to cultural readings in a country where they are absent. 

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With a rapidly developing art scene, Romania has an utter shortfall of publicly accessible reading material on topics related to arts and culture. The only open-access, free library of the sort in the whole country is the one hosted by the National Contemporary Art Museum (MNAC), whose collection mainly centers on dated pieces, which must be consulted on-site only. It is also worth mentioning that even the largest art university (UNArte) lacks a book repository of its own. When it comes to paid sources, there are only two single-person-run bookstores in Bucharest that import leading-edge publications, whose offer, however,  is rather scarce and certainly unaffordable.  

 

We thus set out to establish the first and only open-to-all, free-of-charge, borrow-and -return basis library dedicated to visual arts, curatorial studies, architecture, and performance in Bucharest. Its physical location, inside Malmaison Studios, is also intended to function as an educational and networking space, by setting up a book club, workshops, film projections, and other events. 

                                                                                          2022

                                                                adaptation by Radu Ianoș