New Byzantium presents Rue de Latran, an artist’s edition by Patricia Fernández, comprised of 76 pages of hand printed letterpress, Risographs and silkscreen prints, unique watercolors and digital photo inserts. 

Rue de Latran is the inaugural release of New Byzantium’s subscription based artist’s editions. A total of 5 artist's editions will be released in 2013 for a yearly subscription fee of $300. 25 copies of Rue de Latran will be available for purchase individually at the exhibition for $125. New Byzantium is an independent press and publisher started in 2011 by Blake Besharian. 

Rue de Latran takes its title from the name of a street in Paris where a building once housed the printing press, Ruedo Ibérico, which during the sixties and seventies served as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas that raised social consciousness in Spain against a fascist regime. This site also functioned as a communal space for Spaniards in exile; Fernández’s own father would spend countless hours reading on the staircase and engaging with compatriots in lively symposia. While mining through her father’s collection of books published by Ruedo Ibérico, Fernández rediscovers a caché of letters inside of a carved wooden box her grandfather had made for her that uncovers a shared past between her father’s life and her own that overlaps at rue de Latran. These letters link her to the same address as the printing press where she had lived (unknowingly) fifteen years earlier while studying at the Sorbonne. The epistolary format of Rue de Latran recovers fragments of historicized narratives, synchronicities, personal recollections based on her father’s memories, and her own present experience of someone else’s history. On her most recent visit to France, Fernández meets an exile who had smuggled Ruedo Ibérico books back to Spain at the time of Franco’s dictatorship. By embarking on this passage of the exile through the same route via the Pyrenees, Fernández recounts a non-hegemonic history that manifests its multifaceted authorship as it is retold and rewritten over time. 

Concurrently on view with the release of New Byzantium’s Rue de Latran, Commonwealth and Council presents Fernández’s its yours now. its all that there is. This sculpture is a re-remembered bookcase from her father's library, which is filled with a series objects including small paintings reinterpreting the Ruedo Ibérico books, a repurposed letter and other ephemera. Beginning in 2010 with the construction of the sculpture, Fernández began to collect the materials that make up her epistolary work, built in part as an acknowledgement and a search for understanding the struggles of her father’s generation to ignite social change.