《穿》杂志在驴子当代艺术协会的移动图书馆。Wear journal takes part in the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art‘s mobile library.

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Along the lines of the donkey (re: recent outing), who stands the rather lonely figure amidst the chatty crowd, it is a questionable act to gather with a basket of beers from around the world on the occasion of artist books. Or, it’s just that one mustn’t gather here. Security guards erupt upon slyly innocent donkey caretakers, but artists’ non-communication says enough to call the big brothers who have a bit more persuasive powers. The Donkey Institute and its books were not necessarily here to make a stand, though, so a few prods of the ass and everyone is fine to make a leisurely dashed and dotted caravan further up the street, where we do not disturb the south entrance of Lido Park! It’s a smooth-awkward transition, a meandering gathering that slips away just as the 城管 chéngguǎn slide in with their marked car. The sight of an indignant security guard explaining gross offenses to the 城管 chéngguǎn fades away behind us.

Half a block away, the roving Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art settles into its new location at a busy intersection of northeastern Beijing during rush hour. Passersby range from pyjama-clad grandmothers to young boys on electric scooters and white collar foreigners. Donkey’s rough institutionalising feels like the park we’ve just left, and casual social gathering leads quite naturally to sitting on the ground with knees up, idle chatter, dangling cigarettes. There are stark contrasts within the formations of a socius: park up-spring, lonely donkey, noisy traffic.

And friends. I don’t know many of you, but it supposes that our mutual presencing here around the book cart of a lonely donkey brings us together. What Nancy says about the lack of feeling of the social contract, we know must be much more demanding than that. Like the tall friend in the yellow t-shirt with the kind of face one cannot place as young or old; his smile tells of feeling in everything. He is the happy friend of Michael or Yam or Edward, warm to everyone, always smiling. He puts his long arm around the shoulders of the friend to whom he may be talking to at any moment. Happy, friendly visitor, come join us for dinner. And yet further inquiry reveals that the terms of these relations may make themselves felt in another way; he is an observer, sent by the 城管 chéngguǎn.

公安局的工作员非得要我们拍到好看一点！ The Public Security Bureau officer insists upon several takes before we get it right.

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At the end of a long dinner table, Yam blurts out in English, “He’s police! He’s got a badge!” This kind of information can stun and lend unease to any meal, but after a moment of conscious staring――and seeing that our only potential subversion of donkey cart and artist books has already gone home――Xinjiang food at a long dinner table proceeds in just about the same lively manner. Voices and chopsticks criss-cross in dynamic fashion. The friendly observer is not merely a passive onlooker; during the course of the meal he charmingly makes his way around all edges of the table, offering cigarettes, getting to know everyone. These are tactics, yes, but perhaps no more than those of the smitten out on a first date. Let us get to know the 公安局 Public Security Bureau, of which I later find out he is a part. I am uncertain what forms of freedom or rights I may relinquish in seeing a particular light within this encounter, but perhaps that should depend upon how many dinners we share with those that are watching us. The reports must be written anyway.

As the group disperses after dinner, friendly yellow-shirted PSB officer and I happen to be left alone together to walk a short distance in the same direction, and rather than any other proposed confrontation with the authoritative kind, it is, yes, filled with the awkwardness of potential romance. Me and the PSB! We ask questions about one another. He explains to me how our meeting was set up by the chéngguǎn, which wouldn’t have occurred in the past but now work together after a recently created triumvirate between the police force, PSB and the chéngguǎn (usually separate policing bodies with varying jurisdiction). Why? What threat can there be to fear?

Yellow-shirted friend likes Hong Kong pop music, has been thrust into this line of work by his grandfather and father before him, and now patrols the Dashanzi area in plainclothes as a day-to-day, perhaps making friends with all sorts of people. Our date is not so special, I guess. Even so, my inner monologue is conscious of the rising tension as we walk towards our departure point. He insists upon escorting me all the way to my bicycle, and I wonder what the equivalent of a goodnight kiss would be in this situation.

In the end, I ride away, and he waves goodbye, calling out, “路上要小心!” I like him so much. This could be ridiculous, in consideration that what we in other realms may have considered right could have been infringed upon tonight. It is simply that the contracts make themselves felt in a very different way here, and the small heart of our interactions with representatives of the State are like the awkward openings of an encounter beyond power. I don’t know. This was perhaps just an exception, but it seems like a resolved attitude for many of us in the neighbourhood, where it is possible to acknowledge the overbearing authority of the State and yet pay no heed to it. Everything is means. Like faded propaganda posters, I don’t know how my mind has changed already.

[just read this amazing story from the New York Times… it’s an incredible and touching example of very non-digital information networks and mobile intervention! …wonderful…]

LA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.

His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.

“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.

“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”

A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.

In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.

Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.

The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.

The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.

By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia’s long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria, leading to clashes with guerrillas and intimidation of the local population by both groups.

Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Mr. Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few reading textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels from his small personal library. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups, to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.

A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.

After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.

There is little money left over for such luxuries on his teacher’s salary of $350 a month. Already the family’s budget is so tight that he and his wife, Diana, opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Política, two years ago to help make ends meet.

Even among the restaurant’s clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Mr. Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall above tables laid out with grilled meat and fried plantains, he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region’s daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events.

“We can take political talk only so far, of course,” he said, referring to the looming threat of retaliation from the paramilitary groups, which have effectively defeated the guerrillas in this part of northern Colombia. “I learned that if I interest just one person in reading a mundane news item — say, about the rising price of rice — then that’s a step forward.”

Such victories keep Mr. Soriano going, despite the challenges that come with running the Biblioburro.

He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them.

Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.

And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.

“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.

On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design.

“I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.”

At times, on the remote landscape dotted with guayacán trees, it was hard to tell whether beast or man was in control. Once, Mr. Soriano lost his patience, trying to coax his stubborn donkeys to cross a stream.

Still, it was clear why Mr. Soriano does what he does.

In the village of El Brasil, Ingrid Ospina, 18, leafed through a copy of “Margarita,” the classic book of poetry by Rubén Darío of Nicaragua, and began to read aloud.

She went beyond where the heavens are

and to the moon said, au revoir.

How naughty to have flown so far

without the permission of Papa.

“That is so beautiful, Maestro,” Ms. Ospina said to the teacher. “When are you coming back?”