Artist Iván Argote starts the artistic intervention in the Fine Arts Library of the UCM
The work is scheduled to be inaugurated in October.
The project developed in the Library of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid, with Julia Morandeira as mediator and the library community led by Javier Pérez Iglesias as a group of patrons, has reached its final phase of artistic production and plans to inaugurate the work in the last quarter of the year.
The concomitance, which has been rethinking the specific activities of this and other libraries since 2017, added the Colombian, Iván Argote, as an artist in this process of celebrating the library's potential. This celebration will take the form of two artistic interventions: The first ‘Skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, seek each other and get lost’.’, which will consist of the engraving of a collection of phrases on a series of tables in the Library, and the second, ‘...'.‘A brick that moves’.’, a collective production of clay bricks, also stamped with words or other inscriptions, which will be distributed throughout the faculty, in the same way that borrowed books and ideas travel.
The words and phrases that will be inscribed on the tables and bricks have been collected through a public notice launched at the beginning of the year, in which ideas, words and phrases were collected through the 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 want to accompany you (and the many users to come now and in a hundred years) as you stand in this space? What would you like to see tattooed on the skin of the library, and what do we collectively take responsibility for? From all the material received, the Ranganathan working group, created as a citizens' group for this concomitance and representing the library community, selected the most significant phrases and words that will then be engraved on the library's tables.
Production and next steps
The design of the pieces will be made up of three layers: one in which everything that was sent is included, on another level what Ranganathan edited and, in a final layer, a secret phrase by Iván Argote himself will be included. All these terms and concepts will be connected through lines and paths that generate winds or currents that connect all the knowledge and reflection of the piece.
Since June, a research phase has been activated on where to produce the vinyls that will be installed on the tables, after the selection of the producer, the first proofs of the prints have been received and, during the summer, the planning of how they will be placed on the tables will begin.
A process in full swing, when the library takes a break from the eventful academic period.
