small sacrifices: the book to tear up and ask the right questions

What if the answer to your questions lay in a simple piece of paper torn off at random?

Unidentified literary object, small sacrifices is neither quite a book, nor an oracle, nor a game. It’s a project in its own right, conceived as an artistic, poetic and relational experience. An invitation to let go, to embrace randomness and create a bond.

Beneath its minimalist, black-covered notebook look, this editorial project, designed in France but written in English, questions our relationship to reading, to the book-as-object, and more profoundly, to the search for meaning.

An intimate literary performance

The principle is radical: you don’t read little sacrifices, you tear them up. Literally. We choose a question, close our eyes, tear out a page. And that page becomes our fragment, our answer, our riddle to ponder.

This gesture is not insignificant: to tear out a page is to engage in a form of ritual. We damage in order to receive. You sacrifice one part to keep another. This is the artistic strength of the project: to propose a performative experience that is at once silent, introspective and shared.

We think of ephemeral installations or the works of Fluxus, the 60s art movement that blurred the boundaries between art, play and everyday life.

Silence as a creative act

In an age saturated with content, petits sacrifices opts for reduction. No explanatory text, no integrated social networks, no technology. Just paper, black and white, and words that strike at just the right moment.

The silence between sentences, the emptiness between pages, echoes the work of visual poets or artists like John Cage, for whom silence is a space of freedom. Here, each torn-out page becomes a space for personal projection.

In Paris, a work of art to be circulated

In the city of flânerie, street poetry and the vagaries of the metro, this little book has a natural place. Imagine slipping it onto a bistro table in Belleville, into a book bag at the Recyclerie, or onto a bench in the Jardin des Plantes.

Paris, a city where art mingles with everyday life, is the ideal place to bring this moving object to life. Small sacrifices are designed to circulate. You keep one page, then pass on the rest. The book becomes an incomplete sculpture, marked by the gestures of each individual.

A relational work of art to give as a gift

To offer this book is to offer a moment of introspection. It means holding up a mirror, without imposing a reflection. It’s like proposing a game, but without fixed rules.

Perhaps that’s what makes it such a success: to have created a rare editorial object that acts as a catalyst. Neither moralizing nor explanatory, just open enough for us to project our doubts, intuitions and decisions onto it.

A work with a small print run, but great emotional impact.