ISSUE 20
TAYIBA SULAIMAN
I’ve been haunting Manchester Central Library for almost a decade, ever since I was a teenager walking from the top floor to the very bottom for want of anything better to do. My collages are made up of the maps, flyers and forms I found in the library last summer, as well as text from the library’s council webpage, the North West Film Archive’s catalogue, and the plans for the building’s recent renovation, which were kindly shared with me by Una Phillips. My favourite image from those plans is on the first page: a spiralling cross-section of the building, with imaginary library users represented by symbols that look like tiny lightning strikes. I wanted to imagine what those lightning strikes were doing and thinking when they weren’t just reading or studying – the times they might have been using this place as somewhere to sleep, sing, shout, cry, scroll, change a baby’s nappy, kiss, be sick, or be quiet.
Floor by floor, this is a helter-skelter trip through the library to catch brief flashes of the world moving through and around these vast collections: glimpses of people who are there today, people who were there thirty years ago, people who love this library and people who couldn’t care less. I probably could’ve kept writing it for as long as I carry on coming here, but for now, I wanted to imagine what these people might make of this peaceful place at a time when peace is hard to come by.
