#artists books
Cinco de Mayo
CELESTE CONTRERAS
ForCinco de Mayo, we are proud to present some of the work of a UWM MFA student who has spent a considerable amount of time in our Special Collections in her 3-year graduate career at UW-Milwaukee. Celeste Contrerasis a Xicana-Indigenous artist and activist from Milwaukee who works in a variety of media and narrative forms, such as drawing, painting, printmaking, illustration, installation, animation, public art, and especially artists books. The images shown here come from two of her publications:
- Artist in the Library, published in a limited edition of 200 copies in 2019, is a three-volume set created as a reflection of her time as the 2019 artist-in-residence at the Mitchell Street Branch of the Milwaukee Public Library.
- Cuicatl Xochitl(Song Flower), an artists book produced in an edition of three copies in 2021, presents a series of ghost images; they are so light they are barely there (we had to really enhance the images to make them visible here). The prompt for the visual narrative is based on the cuicatl, the flowering symbol that emerges from the mouth signifying voice. Of this book, Contreras writes:
Sometimes we lose our voices; in transmission – in translation. Sometimes we disappear. But if you look at a certain angle – it’s right there before your eyes. This book is about erasure and impermanence… . Though the actual images are barely there, those who want to see will see and those who do not look they might not see it.
In her practice, Contreras establishes herself as a contemporary Tlacuilo – a scribe, bookmaker, storyteller – a common visual element throughout her current work. This choice is not surprising, especially in her very specific connection to our Special Collections: Contreras chose to do her MFA work at UWM specifically to work with our department head Max Yela, who is also on graduate faculty in the Department of Art & Design with a specialty in the book as an art medium.
Contreras recently completed the installation of her graduate thesis exhibition and it is fantastic! She will be defending her thesis later this month. Congratulations Celeste!!
Make Más Arte!
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FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Responsibility & Memory
Santa Barbara, California, USA. Jana Zimmer’s work includes monotype, collage, assemblage and mixed media on the themes of historical and political responsibility and memory. Zimmer recently participated in Kolaj Institute’s Politics and Collage Residency and she was a panelist at COLLAGE::BOOKS Symposium at Volume 2 MTL in 2019. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
Nashville Collage Collective
The Nashville Collage Collective was at first a collaborative foursome, Lisa Haddad, Eva Sochorova, robert bruce scott, and Randy L Purcell, which eventually became The Four Corners, allowing the Collective to open itself to the larger community. Meeting in studios and public places since 2010, members share whatever they bring to the table resulting in a communal stash of materials, cross-pollinating partnerships and inspiration for beginners and pros alike. The collective’s goal is to maintain the good thing that has evolved over the past decade: a safe space for expression with respect for any creative process involving the juxtaposition of stuff. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Todo y Nada
Deadline: Friday, 15 April 2022. Vayo Collage Gallery invites artists to submit small collage works on the theme “Todo y Nada” (“Everything and Nothing”) for an upcoming exhibition in celebration of the 5th annual World Collage Day. Submissions will be displayed in the gallery from 14-31 May 2022 and will become part of a World Collage Day poster published by Vayo Collage Gallery. In addition, a selection of fifty-two entries will be printed as a full-color deck of playing cards. A panel of five guest jurors will be choosing the collages for this printed deck through a blind jurying process. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Sensitive
Carolyn Boll at Galerie ERGA in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 30 March-3 April 2022. Using her collage book, A Day in the Life of a Highly Sensitive Person, as a departure point, Carolyn Boll’s “Sensitive” reflects the playful potential of the partnering between poetry, image, and dance. Just in time for National Poetry Month with this year’s theme of intimacy, Boll named the show “Sensitive” because of her collage book, created over many years of coming out, and also because of the layers of meaning the word has for her. It is a word that is too often used to suggest one should be less sensitive than they are, when sensitivity is actually such a valuable gift. Boll also loves how the word evokes secrets as in “sensitive information“. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Men on Mars
Mary A. Johnson at Box13 ArtSpace in Houston, Texas, USA through 30 April 2022. A window glowing in pinks and reds of an imaginary Martian landscape reminiscent of the idealized American West, Men on Mars investigates how myth plays a central role in how we experience our own spaces and selves and colors our perception of others. It uses imagery of recent corporate space travel while sardonicizing themes of adventure, exploration and national exceptionalism found in mythic structures. The work pulls from ancient Chinese myth texts Shan Hai Jin and Journey to the West and hybridizes them with American mythology: historical (e.g., Paul Bunyan), contemporary (e.g., Captain America), and ideal (e.g., The American Dream). MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Shattering Expectations
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Society puts a lot of pressure on women to be a certain way. Elysé Jokinen creates collage art to shatter those expectations. Jokinen starts by collecting, altering and intuitively arranging images. Once the clippings find their perfect coordinates on the page, they’re glued by hand with classic rock playing in the background. Her work reminds viewers that there’s beauty in who you are, no matter what you’re told to be. It represents freedom, femininity, equality and yes, a bit of magic. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
This Woman’s Work
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Alumni Gallery through 10 April 2022. “This Woman’s Work” is an exploration of the representation and materiality of the feminine in our culture through the manipulation of mass-produced materials and the performative and pastiche elements of post-modern discourse. Artists Ana Vizcarra Rankin, Daria Souvorova, Sofya Mirvis, and Brian James Spies explore what femininity is in our culture right now through mediums and methodologies rooted as much in traditional notions of “women’s work” as they are in dialogue with contemporary art and culture. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Post: Rethink the Future
at The Blender Gallery in Glyfada, Greece through 30 April 2022. The meta unfortunately is the loss of innocence! It is the realization that tomorrow will probably not be as we imagine or as we wish it to be. Konstantions Patsios, Valentina Biasetti, Alexandros Maganiotis, and Demetrio Di Grado express a critical reflection on the contemporary: who we are and who we will be. Collage, for its extreme synthetic ductility, along with iconographic research and the use of metaphor as a communicative and reflective tool, allowed the artists to express their vision of the world at various levels. The exhibition was curated by Francesco Piazza. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
THIS WEEK AT KOLAJ MAGAZINE
Rethinking the Future, Women’s Work, & Men on Mars
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Post: Rethink the Future
at The Blender Gallery in Glyfada, Greece
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Sensitive
Carolyn Boll at Galerie ERGA in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
COLLAGE COMMUNITIES
Nashville Collage Collective
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Men on Mars
Mary A. Johnson at Box13 ArtSpace in Houston, Texas, USA
COLLAGE ON VIEW
This Woman’s Work
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Alumni Gallery
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Shattering Expectations: Elysé Jokinen, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
Responsibility and Memory: Jana Zimmer, Santa Barbara, California, USA
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE RESIDENCY
Poetry & Collage Residency
Kolaj Institute is pleased to announce the twelve artists selected to participate in the first round of the Poetry & Collage Residency. Over the past two weeks, through discussion and collaboration, the participating artists and writers have been investigating what is at the intersection of collage and poetry. Their efforts will result in a publication of the work they’ve made throughout the month of March. Another two rounds with all new people will take place in April and September with two subsequent volumes being published. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY
“Macgyver” Images Together
Warrensburg, Missouri, USA. Collage is the most natural medium for Casey Babb to work in. It inherently facilitates a dreamlike quality, and allows for a fair amount of free association. Although he studied illustration, printmaking, photography, and animation, Babb found that when faced with the tyranny of a blank canvas, it is a much more intuitive process for him to “macgyver” images together than to create something from absolutely nothing. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Cabinet of Curiosities
at Yellow Cube Gallery in Paris, France through 16 April 2022. “Cabinet of Curiosities, Contemporary Vanities Collection” offers viewers an immersion into the varied universes suggested by the artists on display; a voyage that opens the spirit to an intimate and creative journey through time. These universes both fascinate and disturb, marvel and torment, and bewilder while also bringing the viewer back to an ordinary reality. This is what a contemporary cabinet of curiosities does. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
CALL TO ARTISTS
Collagists in the Archives
Deadline: Sunday, 17 April 2022. The materials collage artists use for the artwork can play a critical role in the work’s meaning and how it makes its way into the world. Historical archives, when one understands how to use them, can be fruitful grounds. In this virtual Residency, held in May 2022, collage artists will learn how to work with an archive to build a project that speaks to themes of community and history. Centered around the Stewart-Swift Research Center at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, participating artists will explore their collections and develop tools they can use to work with archives in their home communities. During the residency, artists will make a collage and write a brief statement about the material used and what the collage says about community, the material in the archive and its history. The resulting artwork will be considered for an exhibition at the Henry Sheldon Museum and for inclusion in a folio of prints and a book. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Home
Lily Hinrichsen at the Lawrence Memorial Library in Bristol, Vermont, USA through 31 March 2022. Lily Hinrichsen’s textile collages are about home, which the artist says “is where my heart is…where I cry when my heart is broken…[it] fortifies me with energy and a full heart…[and it] is my sanctuary.” A portion of the sales proceeds from these collages will go to a local homeless shelter. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Let’s Collage About It
at the Center for Arts and Learning in Montpelier, Vermont, USA through 15 April 2022. “Let’s Collage About It” is a community exhibition of contemporary collage art by fifteen Vermont artists. The exhibit includes a variety of collage techniques by artists of different ages and mediums. The exhibit is curated by artist Jess Quinn. MORE
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Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one’s thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.
“Patriotismis a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.” - Richard Aldington
From our Artists’ Book Collection,A Primer for Democracy (N7433.4 .N673 P76 2004 Cage).
To see anything in our special collections, ask a reference librarian.
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Zoe Beloff: Between Worlds/ An Asylum Seeker in America
Published by Charles Nypels Lab, Van Eyck Maastricht, 2018
5 color Risograph book, 20 pages, 11 x 17 inches, A signed limited edition of 100. $50, purchase here.
“Between Worlds is a documentary picture story that follows the journey of an asylum seeker in the United States. His story is both unique and representative of the millions uprooted by conflict throughout the world who are attempting to start a new life in America. Since filming his journey and incarceration in an immigration detention center was impossible, I decided to draw his experiences as he described them to me.” – Zoe Beloff
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We redesigned our web store and added new books, zines, and prints. Check out www.booklyn.org/shop
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After a brief hiatus we are starting up our Tumblr account again.
Is this thing on?
Do people still use Tumblr?
What would you like to see from us? Featured artists spotlights? Available artists books and zines on our webstore? Events / Workshops / Exhibitions Calendar? All of the above? Let us know by reaching out via direct message.
Need a reminder of who we are:
Founded in 1999, Booklyn is an artist-run, non-profit 501 © (3), consensus-governed, artists and bookmakers organization headquartered at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Booklyn supports artists and organizations committed to environmental and social justice. We work towards this by documenting, exhibiting, promoting, and distributing their work within educational institutions worldwide. We envision a world in which art and bookmaking are tools for education, personal agency, community engagement, and political activism.
Visit our website for more information and stay tuned…
Booklyn is excited to announce the upcoming release of our newest trade publication Freedom of the Presses: Artists’ Books in the 21st Century.
Freedom of the Pressesis a textbook and a toolbox for using artists’ books and creative publications to further community engagement and social justice projects. The book aims to expand and enhance scholarship about creative book-making, reflective of and relevant to the diverse global community of makers and readers. Freedom of the Presses features commentary and images from contemporary artists and scholars.
with essays by:
Kurt Allerslev:: Tia Blassingame :: Stephen Dupont :: Karen Eliot ::Bridget Elmer ::Fly::Ganzeer:: Sarah Kirk Hanley :: Richard Lee :: Florencia San Martin :: Mobile Print Power ::Janelle Rebel ::Aaron Sinift :: Suzy Taraba :: Deborah Ultan ::Marshall Weber ::Anton Wurth :: Xu Bing
This book is available for an exclusive pre-order* solely through our current Kickstarter Campaign, THIS OFFER WILL EXPIRE DECEMBER 17th, so order today!
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We love a unique book format here at the RBML, like this artists’ book by Emily Martin. It features 8 stories and recipes printed on 8 slices of pie. We thought it was a perfect fit for Pi Day!
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Assembling zines with Pau Wau Publications for their recent talk in the MoMA garden.
We’ll be having similar fun with zine maker, librarian, and organizer Barbara Calderón on Wednesday, August 30 at 3pm. Details here.
(Image appropriated from Pau Wau’s Instagram). -jt
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3 Dot Zine founder Devin N. Morris in conversation with MoMA Library staff member Sarah Hamerman in the MoMA garden today, launching the three-part series Zines: Collaborations and Publications in NYC.
Next up: Laszlo Konrath and Brian Paul Lamotte of Pau Wau Publications on August 16andBarbara CalderónofColectiva Cosmica. -jt
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The MoMA Library welcomes the new Instagram account momacontemporaryeditions, which keeps you up to date on this innovative artists’ books publishing program. -jt
Image: Rosângela Rennó (b. 1962, Belo Horizonte). Tudo sobre rodas (Everything on wheels). 2016. Detail of “Photomap” for The Valise
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Readers by Kandis Williams & CASSANDRA Press
Artist statement:
Part of a performance and collage based practice, artist Kandis Williams creates ‘Readers’ of scanned, copied, pasted and reproduced texts, and images. The Readers have informed the last years of Kandis Williams’ aesthetic practice and research -the evolution of a long use of xerox toner as a medium and material. The Readers are text based collages that illustrate thematic bouts of research and struggle with philosophical and historical frameworks around social and political phenomenon that run concurrent to William’s image making practice. Chiefly turned on by the re-arrangement and liquidation of photographic contents, Williams willfully subverts the finality and hermetic nature inherent to the image itself (even the collaged image) offering readers as a secondary or supplemental format for a body of visual or performative expressions. The Readers bind texts around her research to narrativize a stream of propositions found around race, class, gender and nationalism in the contemporary world; tracing a subjectivity molded into and out of the socio-cultural and legal expressions of these constructs.
In 2016, CASSANDRA Press was founded as a publishing project by Taylor Doran, Kandis Williams, and Jordan Nassar making lo-fi activist and academic texts, flyers, posters, pamphlets and readers, in hopes of spreading ideas and sharing perspectives, promoting dialogue, and inspiring further and wider-spread political and social activism.The Readers are just one facet of CASSANDRA founded by Williams, Doran, and Nassar who all produce and curate both as a team and independently of each other. CASSANDRA offers a hydra head approach to the content and dissemination of our publications, dedicated to incorporating our practices as artists into our means of discourse, to self-publishing, re-publishing, re-mix-and-publishing, and to telling the truth.
–sh
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DSC_7020by Russell Moreton
Via Flickr:
Studio Works, Outpost. russellmoreton.blogspot.com/
DSC_7991by Russell Moreton
Via Flickr:
Studio Works russellmoreton.blogspot.com/
WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: 1018 W Scott Street - Thomas Rose, 2005
- Description: “The images are printed on Arches Infinity digital 203 g/m paper on an Epson 4000 by Digi-Graphics in Minneapolis. The clamshell box, typography and printing are by Chip Schilling of Indulgence press. The text is set in the typeface, Century. The pages are printed letterpress from plates onto Arches Infinity 230 g/m paper”–Colophon.
SEE ALL WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY POSTS
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WEIRD FORMAT WEDNESDAY: New Acquisition to the Fine Art Press Collection at the UMN Libraries (a corresponding collection to Gorman Rare Art Books Collection) - Miniature Books created by Jody Williams, 1989-2014
Jody Williams is a local Minneapolis book artist who teaches printmaking and book arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. She has also taught at Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts and the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Her work is in several library and museum collections such as The Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Minnesota Historical Society. Williams has received many grants, awards and fellowships throughout her career.
Her limited edition books are printed and bound with different materials and a vast variety of different formats.
@uispeccoll also wrote a tumblr post about her books in their collection!
RECENT ACQUISITIONS
Book Arts and Fine Press Collection
Throughout the pandemic, Special Collections has continued to support local artists through purchases for the library’s Book Arts and Fine Press Collection. Our catalogers are getting caught up on all those purchases. Here’s a selection from our latest batch, with numerous purchases from the following artists. Click the artists’ names to see all their work and learn more about each piece.
María José Castillo
Fred Hagstrom
C.B. Sherlock
Camilo Aguirre
Browse more of the Book Arts and Fine Press Collection in the Hennepin County Library online catalog. The books are available to view in-person at the Minneapolis Central Library.
#ArtsyFartsyFriday
Happy Pride Month! Take a look at one of our queer-centered miniature books from the Charlotte Smith Collection. Hey Straights Come out of the Closet, by Edward “Ed” Hutchins, is a book calling on straight individuals to stand with the gay community to fight injustices and bigotry. Included in the miniature is a list of three impacts for not speaking out against bigotry:
1. Ignoring it allows it to continue.
2. Ignoring it gives intolerance your stamp of approval.
3. Ignoring it keeps all of us from working together to solve problems that concern everyone.
Hutchins is known for practicing “guerrilla bookmaking,” which is the “process of putting simple bookmaking skills into the hands of everyday people” (Hutchins, “Guerrilla Bookmaking”). Following this practice, Hutchins utilizes simple materials and skills that can be easily replicated by others. In this miniature, for example, Hutchins incorporated one bright pink sheet with photocopied illustrations. This style reminded me of the many photocopied zines in our collections that were often used to spread awareness on social issues in an inexpensive way.
What are your favorite LGBTQ+ books?! Feel free to share them here!
Smith Miniature Collection (HQ76.25 .H882 1994)
More on Guerrilla Bookmaking by Edward Hutchins
-Micaela
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