We activate Iván Argote's work for the Fine Arts Library of the UCM
Date 17/11/2025
Place Fine Arts Library of the Complutense University of Madrid
Address C. Pintor el Greco, 2, Moncloa - Aravaca, 28040 Madrid
Timetable 16:30 a 20:30
On Monday 17 November we will activate the work with which the artist has responded to the commission of the commissioner, Javier Pérez Iglesias.
The library becomes a place for meeting and conversation with the installation of Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983), entitled skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, seek each other and get lost (2025). The work, the result of the Biblioteca Bellas Artes UCM collaboration, invites visitors to listen to the voices inscribed on the tables, those that bear the traces of time, of reading and of the links woven in them.
To attend the activation, which will take place on Monday 17 November, simply come to the library at the time indicated.
PROGRAMME
16.30 > 18.00: printing and conviviality
18.00 > 18.30h conversation «Biblioteca Travesti» between Javier Pérez Iglesias and Jaime Conde Salazar/Doris Marina Electro
18.30 > 20.30h print and agape
The Argote installation consists of intervened wooden library tables and engraved stainless steel plates, arranged like a living organism within the space. The tables - eighteen in total - have been tattooed with phrases and fragments of text compiled from a open call made in 2023, In this questionnaire, readers and library users were invited to answer 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 accompany you and others to come, now and in a hundred years' time?
The result is a collective weaving of voices that unfolds on the engraved surfaces. In negative, the tables also function as woodcut plates, ready to print the word, while the steel plates suspended from the ceiling act as a mirrors that multiply readings and gazes, transforming the room into a space of resonance and dialogue.
Almost everything that happens in a library happens on or around a table: reading, writing, chatting, looking, touching. These tables pick up that pulse and return it in the form of a tattooed word, a shared word.
The project is the result of a concomitance started in 2017 and composed by the librarian Javier Pérez Iglesias as the commissioner and the researcher and curator Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga as a mediator. The creation of the Ranganathan working group (2019-2021), dedicated to rethinking the uses and meanings of libraries, was instrumental in shaping the commission and accompanying its development.
With skin tables, tattoo tables, secret tables, tables that talk, ask questions, seek each other and get lost , Iván Argote once again activates a common space from the affective and the political, proposing an installation that unfolds between silence and the word, between reading and gesture, between the past and the future of the communities that inhabit the library.
