Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Revised Edition) — Batia Suter

Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Revised Edition) by Batia Suter is a meticulously curated visual book that unfolds as an associative atlas of images. In this revised edition, Suter continues her project of gathering, re‑ordering, and juxtaposing photographs, prints, diagrams, and ephemera drawn from found sources and archives, allowing unlikely visual affinities to emerge. Each spread operates like a quiet conversation between fragments of visual culture — the encyclopedic and the intimate, the scientific and the romantic, the literal and the eccentric. Suter’s eye traces patterns of meaning not through text but through adjacency: a botanical illustration next to a mid‑century photograph, a X‑ray beside a surreal cutaway, a tiny emblem beside an architectural plan. The result isn’t a reference work in the traditional sense, but a parallel structure of associations that invites slow, reflective reading. Roma Publications’ sumptuous production enhances the experience, letting the reader move through hundreds of images without hierarchy, in a gesture that feels both archival and personal. Parallel Encyclopedia #2 inhabits the terrain between index and imagination, offering a kind of visual thinking that resists easy categorization and rewards attentive looking — a project that belongs among works by other explorers of the found image and visual taxonomy.

Technical Sheet
Title: Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Revised Edition)
Artist / Author: Batia Suter
Edition: Revised Edition
Publisher / Editor: Roma Publications
Format: Clothbound / quality art book (typical of Roma)
Language: Visual / multilingual
Pages: Extensive image sequences (hundreds)
Publication Context: Contemporary art / visual culture