Jason Botkin
From a red lift, grey dimensional letters and a giant eye fill the wall of an apartment building.
From a red lift, grey dimensional letters and a giant eye fill the wall of an apartment building.

Projects

Self Talk

Self Talk

Self Talk

2025 · Millepages Bookstore

Vincennes, France

Before we learn to tell stories, we inherit them.

Before we learn to describe ourselves, we inherit descriptions.

Much of what I call “me”—identity—arrives pre-wrapped in language.

Created for Millepages Bookstore, Self Talk brings that thought into a composite portrait whose features emerge through words, inviting a movement between recognizing a face and reading what gives it form.

How much of what we call “self” is shaped by the stories we inherit?

Two women talk in front of the bookshop wall, its grey lettering and an eye taking shape behind a red lift.
Two women talk in front of the bookshop wall, its grey lettering and an eye taking shape behind a red lift.
Two women talk in front of the bookshop wall, its grey lettering and an eye taking shape behind a red lift.

From a distance, a face emerges across the bookstore’s façade.

Closer, the words become legible. Lettering gives volume to an eye, follows a contour or folds into shadow. What appeared to be a continuous form separates into language.

Reading changes how the face is seen. Stepping back brings the features together again.

I was interested in shifting attention: the moment an image becomes a sentence, or words become a face before we have read them.

Inside the lift basket: dust sheets, a paint-spattered knee, a backpack and a crumpled black-and-white lettered cloth.
Inside the lift basket: dust sheets, a paint-spattered knee, a backpack and a crumpled black-and-white lettered cloth.
Inside the lift basket: dust sheets, a paint-spattered knee, a backpack and a crumpled black-and-white lettered cloth.

Each of us carries an ongoing conversation with ourselves. Some of its language we choose; some has become so familiar that we scarcely notice it.

Descriptions offered by other people can become things we repeat internally. Stories help us interpret experience, including what we believe is possible for ourselves.

The face does not speak—it is being spoken into existence.

Looking up the wall from the lift, grey letters swell out of the surface in soft relief.
Looking up the wall from the lift, grey letters swell out of the surface in soft relief.
Looking up the wall from the lift, grey letters swell out of the surface in soft relief.

Millepages holds voices that agree, contradict, question and imagine. The books bring other people’s thoughts into reach, allowing a reader to spend time seeing things another way.

The building as a mind. Books as thoughts, shelves as memory, the storefront as a face.

The portrait brought that association onto its exterior, where the voices inside could seem to gather into a presence looking out.

The finished corner: grey lettering and a large eye fill the bookshop wall, red words curling around the window.
The finished corner: grey lettering and a large eye fill the bookshop wall, red words curling around the window.
The finished corner: grey lettering and a large eye fill the bookshop wall, red words curling around the window.

The work continues into the courtyard.

Poetry, quotations, literary references, symbols and small hidden interventions appear throughout the surrounding architecture. Some announce themselves; others take time to find.

The painted bookshop corner at the end of a pedestrian street, bicycles parked along the shopfronts.
The painted bookshop corner at the end of a pedestrian street, bicycles parked along the shopfronts.
The painted bookshop corner at the end of a pedestrian street, bicycles parked along the shopfronts.

An expanded, hand-rendered print edition brings the mural, courtyard and hidden interventions together, mapping connections that cannot all be seen from a single position on site.

Another way to explore the work—and to keep reading.

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© Jason Botkin

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