As with all my projects, the starting point for 2¹¹ was a literary text: a short Japanese story I never got the permission to print.

In the summer of 2022, I stumbled across the extensive preliminary work for the project, which I still found fascinating. It reawakened my ambition to find a way around the printing permission that was never granted. I made various attempts to use the text in a way that would produce a readable result without violating the copyright, and finally I decided to have it professionally encrypted by Jörn Müller-Quade, Professor of Cryptology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The original Japanese text and its English translation went through a complicated process. The result is a long sequence of individual terms. They are printed in Monospace font in the book and bear no relation to one another. That makes them particularly appealing, as they bring up a series of associations and suggestions for the reader or viewer.

The same is true for the illustrations: ten collages of objects of varying size, all of which are described in the original text. The various objects were photographed and scaled before dismantled and collaged. The third section has to do with colors that are mentioned in the original text. Twenty hues are printed as individual stripes across four pages. All three components — illustration, text, and color stripes — are printed on different Japanese papers, each in keeping with the different characters of the prints. The book is bound in a semi-transparent cover with encrypted embossed text for the author and title. It is protected by a semi-transparent sleeve showing parts of an interior view from a two-point perspective. The encryption and deconstruction process is echoed by the puzzle slipcase: a three-part object held together by magnets that is intended to seem confusing when disassembled. The book is intended to work as an independent project, separate from the original, and to inspire people to think about perception, terminology, and interpretation. The original text is merely a starting point from which something new has been created, and no longer plays any role in the book 2¹¹.

concept, design, printing and binding: Veronika Schäpers
text encryption: Prof. Dr. Jörn Müller-Quade and Dr. Jeremias Mechler, KASTEL, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
photography: Blaffert/Wamhof, Nicole Blaffert and Franz Wamhof
two-point perspective: Anja Grunwald
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letterpress from polymer plates on Toshaban ganpi paper, Bicchu ganpi paper and mitsumata paper M41
cover made from kozo paper and Enduro Ice paper with title embossing
three-part puzzle slipcase with title embossing, made by Buchbinderei Mergemeier in Düsseldorf
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52 pages, 22 x 35 cm
edition: 25 copies with consecutive Arabic numerals and
4 copies with consecutive Roman numerals
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Karlsruhe, December 2023