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In 1999, following the UN ballot result for independence, occupying Indonesian forces carried out destruction throughout East Timor. Libraries were systematically burnt. Schools were destroyed throughout the country. In response, I established 'Action for Another Library'. Thousands of books were donated over a two-year period and sent to Dili for the new University Library. The title pages of some books were photographed before the books were shipped to Dili. The project was conceved in practical terms, as a response to the needs of friends and students in East Timor, but also as a kind of memorial, anti-monumental in nature, dispersed in time and place - an attempt to picture a particular history of suffering and resistance. The traces evolved as a kind of drawing. They document an extended set of actions from the past. They were also conceived as a kind of proposition addressed to a future. Tom Nicholson 2006 |