Book on the Wall | Fuego Camina Conmigo

In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, movie theaters displayed photographs in their lobbies, offering audiences a glimpse of what awaited them beyond the box office. By contract, these materials were meant to be destroyed once a film's run had ended. One of the most common ways to do so was to burn them in a vacant lot nearby. A cinephile projectionist in Colombia decided to keep them instead, and decades later an archive of nearly 10,000 of these images resurfaced in Medellín. _Fuego Camina Conmigo_ is an edition of 300 numbered books, each one unique, made from that archive. Its pages are composed of original silver gelatin lobby cards and, on the reverse, risograph-printed frames from films in which fire appears. As the pages are turned, both images coexist for a brief moment and, for a fraction of a second, these photographs catch fire only in our eyes. The book also includes a short reflection by the publishers on the relationship between cinema and fire. Rather than producing an English-language version of the book, the publishers translated the text into a matchbook that accompanies the Spanish edition and includes a small cutout from one of the original lobby cards. For ICP's Book on the Wall series, La Bruja Ediciones and Ediciones Réplica expanded the publication into an installation composed of the same materials found in the book: original movie posters, photographs, and risograph prints, accompanied by a projection of excerpts from fire scenes in the films. The installation takes the form of a modular wheat-pasted mural attached to one of the bookstore's walls, bringing into focus the circulation, persistence, and afterlife of images.