Re-cover project is an art project that consists in the creation of alternative covers for existing books. There are no pre-set criteria for the choice of books, other than being a reflection of our interests and references, and the featured photographs or snapshots are taken while out and about, only very rarely with a specific title in mind. This lends the process a spontaneous and experimental character that resurfaces in the playfulness of the final work.
Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes This picture was taken in Amsterdam, 2004. Ted Hughes was an English poet and children's writer. Birthday Letters was first published in 1998. The 2003 film Sylvia tells the story of Ted Hughes' relationship with the American poet Sylvia Plath. "It was a visit from the goddess, the beauty Who was poetry's sister - she had come To tell poetry she was spoiling us. Poetry listened, maybe, but we heard nothing And poetry did not tell us. And we Only did what poetry told us to do."
This picture was taken in Mont Royal, Montreal 2009.
John Keats was an English poet. His first volume of poems was published in 1817. The 2009 film Bright Star, written and directed by Jane Campion, is based on the last years of Keats' life. "BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art - Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors - No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever - or else swoon to death."
The novel was adapted to cinema in 2006, and it was directed by Tom Tykwer. "The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter."
Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
