Kajsa Dahlberg

A Room of One’s Own/One Thousand Libraries . 2006

Kajsa Dahlberg . + Moderna Museet . Art-Agenda

A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries is a compilation of all the marginal notes made by readers in the Swedish library copies of Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 pamphlet A Room of One’s Own.
The piece is an analogy to the content of the book were Woolf, using Mary Beton as her alter ego, is searching for the representation of women throughout the history of literature. She is astonished by the endless and peculiar depictions of women written by men, while there are very few books written by women. Throughout the book she is describing, not only the search for a literature written by women, but also the conditions under which this literature was written.
In A Room of One’s Own/A Thousand Libraries Woolf ’s words are reframed within a collective script of responses, tied together not only across individuals, but also across a period of nearly half a century (Woolf ’s book first appeared in Swedish in 1958). One of the most underlined sentences is: “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Kajsa Dahlberg