Project Overview
Bibliobandido
Bibliobandido is a public art and literacy movement codesigned by artist Marisa Morán Jahn with the Library Club of El Pital, a rural community in Honduras that centers around ‘Bibliobandido’ (’story eater’), a masked bandit that eats stories and playfully pesters little kids to nourish him with stories they’ve written. As Bibliobandido’s fame eventually rivaled that of Santa Claus, the project grew over a decade to encompass tens of thousands of youth across 19 participating Honduran communities. Read more in ArtForum.
Bibliobandido workshops also spread to Central and North America, taking root in institutions ranging from the Seattle Public Library, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Studio Museum in Harlem, Sugar Hill Museum of Art and Storytelling, Queens Museum, and additional universities, festivals, schools, and museums where storytelling is urgent. In 2015, the Seattle Public Library adopted Bibliobandido as the mascot of their digital media programs and provide trainings to librarians on how to adapt the legend for their own communities.
(Map by Marisa Morán Jahn with Anjum Asharia)
Bibliobandido: Story-Eater (Installation)
Photo by Michael Palma Mir, 2018
As if you stepped into the belly of some belching beast or into a shadowy dense forest, ‘Bibliboandido: Story-Eater” is an immersive, participatory installation embodying the legend around ‘Bibliobandido’, a story-eating bandit created by Marisa Morán Jahn and the Library Club of El Pital, Honduras. The exhibition originally curated by Amy Rosenblum Martín features three focal points where visitors can hear Honduran youth about the Bibliobandido-themed myth and rituals they created (see video below), craft a small book to create their own story, and offer a story to appease Bibliobandido’s insatiable appetite. When visitors kneel to share their story and peek through a hole in the wall, a motion-triggered sensor activates a whir of lights and rumbling, burping sound — as if you’re inside the belly of Bibliobandido.
In 2018, this exhibition debuted at the Sugar Hill Museum of Art and Storytelling located in Central Harlem — where middle school literacy rates rank at 30% of the city-wide median and where Bibliobandido becomes urgent. In 2019, the exhibition travelled to the STAMPS Gallery at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, curated by Srimoyee Mitra. Previous versions were exhibited at Studio Museum of Harlem in Caribbean, an exhibition curated by Elvis Fuentes, and as a performance at Pérez Art Museum Miami curated by Emily Mello. Marisa Morán Jahn’s collaborators for the installation seen here include Dario Nunez-Armeni and Amy Rosenblum-Martín.
Original Bibliobandido Video
Created with the community of El Pital, 2012