Commisions

Fine Arts Library UCM

Madrid (Community of Madrid)

Location: Madrid (Community of Madrid)
Period: 2018-2025

"Rediscovering the library as a space of seduction and possibility".

The concomitance of the Library of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid arises from the approach of a group of librarians of this space to the Concomitentes project with a question: how can we update the ways of using and being in this library in particular, and libraries in general? Bearing in mind that every library is an organism that touches many people who relate to it, we activated a participatory, collaborative and open mediation process in order to involve the voices and experiences of the entire user community.

Thus was launched Ranganathan, a working group focused on collectively discussing, expanding and problematising the use and universe of this and all libraries. Named after the famous Indian librarian, S. R. Ranganathan, the group involves different groups inside and outside the library: the BBAA librarian team; students and teachers from Fine Arts and from all the UCM, as well as from other university institutions; the library community and library users; the artistic, design and architecture community.

We also worked with Sagrado Nova, a facilitator and service designer with whom we articulated different strategies and spaces for co-creation. Together we facilitated debates, conversations, questions and workshops that made it possible to articulate the commission from a propositional point of view. That is, how to think about the commissioning not from what is missing in this library, but rather from the singularity that this library generates.

What is the uniqueness of the UCM Fine Arts Faculty Library? The power of the encounter with ideas, with books, with writing and reading processes: the encounter with others, as well as with oneself; encounters between classes and subjects, between departments and faculties, between students, workers, teachers and librarians. The library is a compendium of knowledges and doings that instigates ways of understanding what a collection and archive of the commons is and can be, a situated and shared knowledge; a unique bank of material and immaterial objects, of knowledge and experiences articulated according to different orders and vectors, more or less rigid. It is a machine of times, of the production of futures. Or perhaps "more than a space for cultivating the future, the library is a garden for enjoying the present" as the librarian Daniel Goldin points out, quoted in the text that Michèle Petit gave us in a Ranganathan working session.

Based on this observation, the commission for this concomitance raises the question: how can we imagine an artistic intervention that both accounts for and celebrates this capacity for multiple and multiplying encounters displayed by the library activities of this library? A contagious power that is neither subscribed to nor restricted exclusively to its physical space, but which we also identify in other libraries and even in other spaces that we do not name as libraries, but which, in some way, circulate and activate forms of doing, of encounter, of knowledge and experience that are their own. In short, ways of making a library.

To carry out this commission, we have invited the artist Iván Argote. Argote stands out for his interventions in public space that, from sculptural and poetic languages, reveal different dynamics - be they tensions, passions, attractions, or spatial relations - that inhabit the ways of being together and producing collectivity: how we live and are together, how we can live and be together in other ways, and what processes of collective writing and signification are yet to be imagined. Her work largely incorporates participatory and collaborative processes, bringing together diverse experiences and voices in production, and devising specific methodologies in each case.