Bulletin 67 | Sofía del Pedregal

Bulletin 67 started from a playful exercise of designing a publication using as a reference a series of 156 bulletins published from 1968 to 1989 by the Art&Project gallery located in Amsterdam. These bulletins, in 4-fold tabloid format, originally were catalogs of the gallery’s exhibitions that were easy to distribute by mail and thus internationalize the art scene in The Netherlands. Then, these publications became artist’s books where multiple artists of various nationalities were requested to design their bulletin with the only requirement of keeping the original bulletin cover’s graphics.

The artist Sofía del Pedregal references the design and proposal of Bulletin n°66 made by Marcel Broodthaers in 1973, whose design was a catalog for a fictional retrospective exhibition of his work. Based on this reference, the artist creates her fiction of a retrospective exhibition of her work, precisely reproducing the design of bulletin n° 66 (cover and inside) She kept the titles and years of the Broodthaers catalog but replaced the photographs of the original publication with photos from her photo archive (2018-2021)

Bulletin 67 distances itself from its reference by adding new pages to Broodthaers’ publication where the artist deletes the photographs but keeps the titles. Furthermore, the original titles of the works in the catalog are relocated to the page and disintegrated into isolated words and dates.

Based on the visual and conceptual similarities of the original bulletin and the one created by the Sofía del Pedregal, this publication plays with the fiction (and some humor) of the space and time of a photographic archive. This work proposes a timeless conversation and anachronical collaboration between artists from different contexts, where the textual and visual narratives dialogue through the artist’s book format.

This book was designed and self-published in California in 2021 by Sofía del Pedregal.