Michael Schneider / Elisabeth Parth
Nobody is against it
With ink drawings by Michael Schneider, translated into
book form by Elisabeth Parth.
With quotes from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Shirley Hayes, Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.
Book cover: Loose-leaf edition, in slipcase
Binding: Flexagon
Paper/book block: Cardboard (ca. 1 mm)
Paper/slipcase: Cardboard (ca. 1 mm), covered with
brown packing paper
Size: ca. 26 x 12 cm
Weight: ca. 300 g
Content: 3 Flexagons
Language(s): English
Year of publication: 2013
Edition size: One of a kind (owned by the City of Yalova)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, defines flexagons as flat models, usually constructed by folding strips of paper, that can be flexed or folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the back and front.*
The concept for this book project goes back to Susan Viguer who included a flexagon in a Festschrift to Hedi Kyle** as a “tribute to her seeing content as inseparable from (…) form.” Viguer believes that using a flexagon as a book/narrative allows for four different perspectives of one event. “That content is a key to the cutting/folding that creates the structure, the story becoming clear only when that cutting/folding is correct.”
Further, the flexagon makes it possible to combine several perspectives. The perspectives on nature - adopted by people - are an important part of a worldwide debate on key issues, which have been discussed in urban centers in particular.
Trees play an important part in this book. Yalova, a city in the Northwest of Turkey, identifies with them; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk relocated a house (Yürüyen Köșk) for a tree. In New York, the city council and the citizens fought for the
trees in Washington Square Park - today, several parties are struggling for Gezi Park in Istanbul.
In the book, Nobody is against it, all these positions and perspectives are combined.
* Oakley, C. O.; Wisner, R. J. (March 1957). "Flexagons". The American Mathematical Monthly (Mathematical Association of America) 64 (3): pp. 143-154.
** „Recipe for a Complicated Dinner (in 4 steps)“, In: Hedi Kyle, Festschrift 2009, Rutherford Witthus (Ed.), Walpole/New Hampshire, pp. 122-127