Simon Fujiwara
The Unwritten Erotic Saga of the Fujiwara Family (1st Edition), 2010
18 volumes of hand-made leather-bound books, embossed in gold lettering with a total of 12,775 pages, 2 eggs, 2 photographs (one of Fujiwara’s father and one of the Hotel Munber)
140 x 32 x 22 cm
Appromixately the height of the artists’ father, this stack of leather-bound books is part family portrait, part tale of post-Franco era Spain, part fiction. Each page has a date printed on it, the first being 20 November 1975 — the day of the dictator’s death and as a direct consequence also the day Spain lifted a ban on erotica. Fujiwara’s parents were running Hotel Munber in the Costa Brava during the final years of the dictatorship. This Saga could be seen as a monument to Fujiwara’s struggle in the period spanning 2006–2010 to complete an erotic novel with his father as the main protagonist, set in the hotel.
Attempting to finish writing this fiction Simon Fujiwara travelled to Mexico. Instead of completing the book he produced this work, with the final date being 20 November 2010. This is exactly 100 years after the start of the 1910 Mexican Revolution and just shy of the 200-years from when Mexico gained its independence Spain.
The cover of Volume 18 is propped open so that the date can be read. It is held up by an egg, visible as nod to the rumour that Franco was missing one testicle. Inside Volume 4 (1981–1983) sits a secret egg that coincides with the year the artist was born. The egg and other artifacts are like objects in a treasure hunt, a scattering of ‘evidence’ that pop up in various works, together weaving narratives of shared human pasts, autobiographical elements, ethnology and eroticism. In doing so Fujiwara plays with soft contrasts; using fiction to hold up a mirror to reality and foregrounding sexuality as both a battleground and space of escapism.
