Sur Place

Sur Place is a fascinating object. Not only as a book and for its design, beautifully crafted (as ever) by Irma Boom. But also for the way it strangely coincides with the downfall of its initiator, the Belgian-Dutch bank Fortis.

The catalogue of an exhibition held in the spring and summer of 2007 in a sublime old building in central Amsterdam (a building that has since become part of the Hilton Hotel on Herengracht), the book extensively documents Fortis’s enormous art collection. At the time, Fortis was one of the largest banks in the world, soon to be famously nationalised by the Dutch government a year later in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (to become what is now ABN AMRO), and the affair would contribute to the collapse of the Belgian government, an episode known as Fortisgate. Knowing what would follow, it’s hard not to see a certain irony in the title Sur Place, used here as an image for the moment before the launch of a new phase at Fortis, “ready for the following stage of its development” (as stated in the preface by Fortis CEO Jean-Paul Votron).

Aside from this strange backstory, Sur Place looks at first like a fairly classic exhibition catalogue, presenting all the works from the show one after another in a quite methodical way. But the first part of the book, showing every single piece of the collection through tiny, low-quality images, has something fascinating about it. Nothing is clearly revealed of what structures this kaleidoscopic grid behind the scenes, and the empty patches are intriguing, all the more so in the way they dialogue with the rest of the catalogue.

Sur Place is certainly not the book in which Irma Boom’s special talent reveals itself most strikingly, and yet something catches the eye in this one-kilogram brick with its screen-printed floral motif along the edge.

The book was published in 2007 to coincide with the exhibition Sur Place at the Fortis Foundation for Art and Historical Objects in Amsterdam, which ran from 1 May to 31 July 2007, and was named one of the Best Dutch Book Designs of 2007 by the Stichting De Best Verzorgde Boeken (awarded in 2008).