24-page 15 x 20 cm hardcover book released in December 2025.
…nada puede ser terminado por completo. Todo trabajo supone una construcción en abismo en la que cada pliegue remite a otro pliegue. Desplegar el abanico de un recuerdo o de un texto conduce al encuentro de nuevos pliegues. Alisar una imagen es encontrar en la nueva superficie las líneas de la superficie anterior, pero modificadas.
…nothing can be completely finished. All work involves a construction in abyss in which each fold refers to another fold. Unfolding the fan of a memory or a text leads to the encounter of new folds. To smooth an image is to find on the new surface the lines of the previous surface, but modified.
Denise León
The Spanish expression cajón de sastre, which originally referred to the drawer in a tailor shop where odds and ends that might come in handy in the future were stashed away, is often translated into English as “jumble” or catch-all.” The term is used by Spanish speakers to describe a variety of things cobbled together under a single heading. In spoken language, it can easily be misconstrued by those who have only a hazy notion of the tailor’s art as cajón desastre (disaster box).
This book, which has been produced using a combination of image and text editing tools installed on my Macintosh computer, Adobe image editing software, and the editing options featured on a commercial platform designed for the creation of family photo albums, is a reworking of a collage series I created in the 1990s based on a series of small soft-bound booklets published jointly by The Metropolitan Museum and The-Book-of-the Month-Club in the 1940s and 50s. The original Metropolitan Miniatures booklets featured descriptions of works in the Metropolitan Museum collection and came with sets of stickers readers were expected to match with the appropriate printed text.
The first time I explored this curious bridge between high-brow and middle-brow American culture, I collaged alternative images over the original stickers but left the original texts intact. However, when I decided to revisit the same material more than two decades later, I was immediately drawn to the possibility of digitally mani-pulating, erasing, and replacing the text sections and massaging them into images. What started as a rather straightforward collage project became a palimpsest that I worked on daily for the better part of a year.
On the first few pages, fragments of additional text have been applied in multiple layers over the original Metropolitan Miniature texts. As the book progresses, however, the original texts are progressively effaced and replaced by others, which, in turn, become sparser until the final page remains completely blank.
Overlaid texts in Cajóndesastre include fragments of poems by Catullus, Audrey Lourde, James Schuyler, Marwan Makhoul, Maureen McLane, Noor Hindi, Constantine P. Cafafy, Yevgueni Yevtushenko, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Strand, and Arthur Sze; a line from Sergio Ruzzier’s This Is Not a Picture Book! (which in Spanish is titled Qué libro más tonto); texts of a Ukrainian folksong and Norman dello Joio’s To Saint Cecilia; songs recorded by the Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum; personal correspondence that ranges from a letter to God that I wrote as a young child and a letter I received from my mother years later lamenting her loneliness, complaining about my grandfather’s television viewing habits, and reporting a violent incident at a local hospital, to a poem written by a French friend long ago; spam that landed in my email inbox; and conversations maintained via Google +. Also included are fragments of pages from Simone de Beauvoir’s Pour une morale de lámbiguïté, Bernie Sander’s It’s Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism, and Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage; excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Happy Prince”; correspondence between the Spanish poets Miguel Hernandez and Federico García Lorca; an interesting reflection by poet and essayist Denise León on Proust and Walter Benjamin; a fragment of an interview with Claude Lelouch about his 1995 film version of Les Miserables; documents photographed in various European archives; labels of artworks photographed in museums; pages from translation handbooks; NGO reports on environmental issues, hunger, and displacement in various parts of the world; a recipe for Gazpacho; a reproduction of handwritten corrections by Proust on a proof copy of a volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu; a fragment of a calligraphic drawing that I received as a gift from the Portuguese artist, writer, and filmmaker Ana Hatherly; and examples of Moon type, a British alternative to Braille.
A limited edition of ten copies of this book is being offered to museums, libraries, and archives on a donation basis.
Click on the images below to enlarge them.
Below: three iterations of a page of Metropolitan Miniatures—the original version, the collaged version created in the 1990s, and a digitally produced version produced in 2025.
Special boxed set of Cajóndesastre and eight panels from the Metropolitan Miniatures collage series. Collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York.
