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NON:op Arts & Humanities
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NON:op Arts and Humanities is a Chicago-based non-profit organization that creates experimental art experiences by and for all Chicagoans.
NON:op engages diverse Chicago communities with participatory projects where people use the arts to create a more just society.
INVENTORY OF LOST BOOKS
Chapters 2 & 3
Already in development for several years, Inventory of Lost Books has become increasingly timely as book bans and challenges have accelerated across the United States. This August, NON:op Arts & Humanities presents the Chicago premiere of Inventory of Lost Books, a collaborative public humanities project exploring censorship, cultural memory, and the preservation of stories through immersive installation, sound, performance, video, and public participation.
Presented at Theatre Y Gallery from August 6–23, 2026, the exhibition arrives at a moment when more than 4,000 unique titles have been affected by school book bans in 2025 alone, with works by and about historically marginalized communities among those most frequently challenged. Against this backdrop, Inventory of Lost Books asks a simple but urgent question:
What is lost when books are silenced?
Presented by NON:op Arts & Humanities, the Theatre Y Gallery exhibition features Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of an evolving four-part project created through a collaboration between book artist Amanda Love and composer and sound artist Christophe Preissing, with video by Liviu Pasare and performances by E'Mon Lauren & Kyle Gregory Price.
Originating from a concept by Amanda Love, Inventory of Lost Books examines the life, suppression, destruction, and preservation of books—and the ideas they carry. Rather than focusing solely on the destruction of books as physical objects, the project explores the stories, histories, and voices they preserve, asking what responsibility we share in protecting access to knowledge and cultural memory.
At Theatre Y, visitors move through two interconnected immersive environments that place them inside the moral and emotional landscape of censorship.
Chapter 2 recreates a regulatory world of towering stacks of books, whispered voices, and the sounds of bureaucratic labor. Books are cataloged, sorted, stamped, and classified while visitors are invited to participate in acts of judgment that reveal how censorship emerges not only through dramatic acts, but through ordinary systems, institutional processes, fear, and social compliance.
Chapter 3 expands into a powerful visceral environment where projected imagery, vibration, sound, and live performance evoke destruction in its many forms. Fire and water, machinery and crowds, and the results of institutional action and individual choices converge in the visible destruction of books, but also the quieter erosion of collective memory and individual rights through neglect, indifference, and silence.
Experienced through intimate 30-minute timed entries for small groups, the installation invites audiences to become participants not just spectators. Rather than prescribing answers, Inventory of Lost Books creates space for reflection, asking visitors to consider the fragile relationship between knowledge, power, public memory, and the freedom to read.
The Chicago presentation represents the second and third chapters of a larger four-part project that will culminate with Chapter 4 at the Cleveland Public Library in 2027.
Artists' Bio's
Meet the co-creators and collaborators for INVENTORY OF LOST BOOKS: Chapters 2 & 3
Amanda Love
Amanda Love (Visual Artist) is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist whose sculptural mixed-media practice transforms discarded books, paper, and pulp-based archival materials into reconstructed forms and immersive installations. Known for versatile works ranging from intimate objects to expansive environments, Love explores the book as both a physical object and a cultural symbol.
As a former bookbinder, Love brings a deep understanding of paper, thread, ink, structure, and material processes to her work. Through dismantling, layering, stitching, painting, accumulation, and reconstruction, she examines how knowledge, memory, and cultural histories shift form to endure. The startling, persistent issues of censorship, book banning, and the resulting cultural destruction create a void that Love is compelled to illuminate. In certain bodies of work, redaction and obscured text serve as visual and conceptual strategies, suggesting absence, protection, and erasure. Across her broader practice, the book is granted a second material life; printed matter morphs into artistic forms with fresh voices.
Love’s work invites viewers to consider how paper and print retain meaning even when discarded, displaced, or altered. Through sculpture, installation, and participatory environments, Love asks how knowledge changes form to survive and how her act of transmutation can become a form of preservation and a call to action.
Love has participated in numerous residencies, exhibits regularly nationwide, and has received grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives and works in Granville, Ohio.
Chris Preissing
Christophe Preissing (Sound Composition & Libretto) is a composer, intermedia and installation artist, curator, producer, and artistic instigator who creates music and sound for live, interactive, and immersive environments. He holds Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2012, he founded NON:op Open Opera Works, a Chicago-based nonprofit arts organization, where he serves as artistic director.
Preissing has been an artist-in-residence, fellow, or sponsored artist at Indiana University, Beloit College, Ball State University, Experimental Sound Studio, High Concept Labs, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA-France, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, MISE-EN_PLACE, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Millay Arts, PLAYA, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events/Chicago Cultural Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts.
His work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arts Midwest/Meet the Composer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Illinois Arts Council Agency, Experimental Sound Studio, City of Chicago, American Composers Forum, Partners of the Americas Illinois, and fellowships from the Pritzker Foundation and Columbus School for Girls.
Preissing’s music has been performed by the Adrian Dunn Singers, International Contemporary Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion, Chartreuse, ensemble mise-en, Mocrep, NON:op, and Kosmologia. His work has also been presented in collaboration with Khecari Dance Theatre, Kristina Isabelle Dance Company, enidsmithdance, and Ayako Kato, and with video artists and filmmakers including Liviu Pasare, Charlie Simokaitis/Groundfire Pictures, and Octane Rich Media.
Recent projects include Chopping Block, a six-channel audio work with live performance; Ambiguation, a 16-channel audio work; and Tigris, a 20-channel speaker and transducer installation created with visual artist Amanda Love and presented at the Springfield Museum of Art. Other works include Memoria de Memoria, created in remembrance of Keith Cooper and Chicago’s 794 homicide victims in 2021; INSIDE: 28 Improvisations Inside a Piano; and the installations Blood Lines: Remembering the 1919 Chicago Race Riots, Street Sheets, and Portrait of Carrie Sandahl.
Through NON:op, Preissing develops collaborative, community-engaged projects at the intersection of art, public memory, and social justice. Since 2020, the organization has focused on expanding access, experimentation, and creativity across communities while working collectively toward a more just society. Projects he has directed and produced include SAY THEIR NAMES, an interactive memorial documenting Black Americans killed by law enforcement; Viral Silence: Community Portraits in Response to COVID-19; Aural Neighborhoods: Listening to Neighborhood Chicago; and HPSCHD@50. He is currently collaborating with artist Amanda Love on Inventory of Lost Books, an immersive, participatory installation exploring censorship, cultural memory, and the freedom to read.
Liviu Pasare (Video & Projection Design) has a Chicago-based practice creating visual experiences using new media and technology. He works as a video designer, cinematographer, editor and animator, and has produced, directed and performed for live events. He has worked on projects such as inSite, Luminous Field (Luftwerk); Winter Pageant 2014, The Elephant and The Whale (Redmoon Theater); This Is Not a Cure for Cancer, Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology (Collaboraction Theatre Company); Spark (Adventure Stage); and Mementos Mori (Manual Cinema); among many others. He is currently pursuing an MFA degree in Art and Technology at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and is advancing an academic approach to Video for Performance as faculty at DePaul University.
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Liviu Pasare
Liviu Pasare (Video & Projection Design) has a Chicago-based practice creating visual experiences using new media and technology. He works as a video designer, cinematographer, editor and animator, and has produced, directed and performed for live events. He has worked on projects such as inSite, Luminous Field (Luftwerk); Winter Pageant 2014, The Elephant and The Whale (Redmoon Theater); This Is Not a Cure for Cancer, Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology (Collaboraction Theatre Company); Spark (Adventure Stage); and Mementos Mori (Manual Cinema); among many others. He is currently pursuing an MFA degree in Art and Technology at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and is advancing an academic approach to Video for Performance as faculty at DePaul University.
Artist’s Statement: Liviu Psare
"I consider video projections as my medium of choice and I develop images, installations and experiences that are transformative and immersive. I use a process of exploration and inquiry about how we engage with our surroundings and I transform spaces with large scale projections and video installations.
Technology has always played a pivotal part in the history of creative expression. This is evident through the use of materials and tools that enabled various ways of recording what we see and communicating information from pre-historic cave paintings through youtube. The tools used in creative expression are technological in nature and historically, a progressive attitude towards the use of technology becomes relevant."
E'mon Lauren
E’mon Lauren (Performing Artist) is a poet, writer, performer, educator, and producer based on Chicago's West Side, and the city's first Youth Poet Laureate. Her debut collection Commando was published by Haymarket Books, and her work appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, Poetry Magazine, Sixty Inches From Center, and Vogue. She is the director of artistic programming at #LetUsBreathe Collective, where she curates and leads cultural events across Chicago, and the founder of Word Is Bond, a community poetry workshop program built to put literary tools in the hands of Chicago youth and working adults. As executive producer, host, and creator of The Real Hoodwives of Chicago, she has built one of the city's most distinctive media platforms for Black femme storytelling. Her practice is rooted in Hood Womanism, a philosophy of centering Black femme experience from Chicago's West and South Sides. Her performances have appeared at the Poetry Foundation, Sofar Sounds, A City Connected (Cubs x Nike), and across Chicago's major cultural venues.
Kyle Price
Kyle Gregory Price (Performing Artist) is a Chicago based composer, writer and educator living within realms of chamber composition, children’s music, experimental music, theatre and performance art. Recent studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 2025) coalesced these practices into one voice generated from a new and heavier basis on the written word. Although a frequent solo artist, he collaborates with an international range of multidisciplinary creatives from the free jazz, experimental music and performance art scenes. He has performed in Rotterdam, Tokyo, Japan, Montréal and Toronto. He co-designs and produces programming and performances for an array of audiences and venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Newberry Library and the Chicago Park District. A trained writer and musician with a punk ethos, Kyle has self-released several cassettes, CD-Rs and a 7’’ 33RPM vinyl of original chamber songs for children called We Are… The Lucky Trikes.
CREDITS
Presented by
NON:op Arts & Humanities
A Performance Installation
Conceived by Amanda Love in Collaboration with Christophe Preissing
with Video by Liviu Pasare
and Performances by E'mon Lauren & Kyle Gregory Price
Visual Art • Amanda Love
Sound Composition & Libretto • Christophe Preissing
Video & Projection Design • Liviu Pasare
Performers • E’mon Lauren & Kyle Gregory Price
Technical Support • Christopher Haite & Justin Cavazos
PR & Marketing • True Muse, Inc.
Artistic Director • Christophe Preissing
Board of Directors • Saba Ayman-Nolley, Christopher Haite, Jill Jerome & Ja Nelle Pleasure