skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, seek each other and get lost
The concomitance of the Biblioteca de Bellas Artes UCM, mediated by Julia Morandeira, was born out of the desire to create a work of art for the library of the same name located at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Rather than thinking of the commission as one that should help to fix what was not working, the commissioner Javier Pérez Iglesias, together with the Ranganathan working group (2019-2021), saw the commission as an opportunity to celebrate the space generated by the library.
Thus, the installation skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, seek each other and get lost, The exhibition, conceived by Iván Argote, seeks to account for all those relationships that are continually being made and unmade in this place, for the multiple encounters that libraries bring about. The wooden tables, belonging to the existing furniture, were intervened by the artist with phrases compiled through an open call that, during several weeks in 2023, invited all the users, visitors and admirers of this space to respond to three questions: What phrases, verses, or quotes evoke the library for you? What would the tables in this library say if we let them speak? What words would you like to see accompany you and others to come now and in a hundred years' time?
All the contributions received are tattooed on the surface of eighteen tables. Engraved in negative, the tables also function as xylographic plates for printing the inscribed word. The tables are accompanied by a set of steel plates suspended from the ceiling, also engraved with fragments of the text and its undulations, which act as mirrors that explode the reading and the gaze in multiple directions. The installation welcomes and gathers those who come to sit down, multiplying the circulation and the exchange of looks, words and ideas that takes place in it.
In the first activation of the pieces, one table was selected for printing. Activations of the remaining seventeen tables will be held over the next few years.
