Steel and concret. 120 x 30 x 200 cm

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In 2008 I produced a serie of pieces that emphasized books as sculptural objects. The negative spaces of several books open at different angles were filled with volumes of cement embedded to geometrize their interior space and value them as continents. This series has recently been taken up and expanded to generate a new presentation that reinforces its minimalist appearance through the accumulation and deployment of pieces to form a sculptural landscape.

Most of the books used are technical manuals, universal and natural histories or obsolete geographical atlases, together with some of the notebooks that were used in the show “Joan Brossa dels Ventalls” – the beginning of the original project. The weight of the cement volumes and the internal arrangement of the groups make it impossible to consult the books. This obsolescence and impossibility of use pose the problem of the future of book as vehicle for the transmission of knowledge in the digital age.

This piece is completed with an iron shelf that contains replicas of some of the cement pieces without the books, arranged on the shelves and in formations that in some cases recall volumes arranged in bookstores and in others, urban groupings or statistical cheeses.