There is a literature that is reluctant to stay in the books and only inhabit the editorial stamps. That literature looks for spectators and jumps to museums. From these, it opens even a door that seemed sealed: the most radical rematerialization of the text.
This intention is the one that leads Stan Douglas to assume an umpteenth version of memories of the underdevelopment, of Edmundo Desnoes, and to make it of passage in museum piece. And it is the one that encourages Pedro G. Romero to give object form to the archive or to consider the catalogue as a sculpture. Glenda León transforms the words about art into objects that engulf. Cristina de Middel builds diptychs in which Mao’s red Book is confronted with the economic model of today’s China. Gonzalo Elvira rescues covers of forbidden books or imagines others that do not exist today, but who knows if we can see them tomorrow in a bookstore. Joan Fontcuberta drags the variations of a multiple Blow Up in which cross Queco Larraín, Julio Cortázar, Antonioni or Brian de Palma. Daniel G. Andújar offers material consistency to critical knowledge that runs on the Internet. Paul Virilio detected in the exhibition the ideal format to express his ideas on the catastrophe and the accident … These artists make the illustration (by their visual sense) in illustration (by their philosophical sense). Hence the museum, for them, goes from being a space destined to see a space conducive to reading.
Recently, in the Azkuna Zentroa of Bilbao, the exhibition was held, conceived by the collective Bulegoa Z/B. There they lectured Bifo, Carles Guerra or Tamara Díaz Bringas. In a session, Dora Garcia spoke of her beginnings as an artist in the 1980s in Spain from all that she then did not know. His was an exhibition (in any sense of the word) of gaps to be filled. A score that can only be understood as an essay, whose translation in art can refer to usual terms, but not always happy, as work in progress or “process dynamics.” In all this floats a criticism to the status quo of the literary system, wielded from a book mutation (in form) preserving however its original sense (in the background). These artistic conversions show that the book is more alive than ever, although its survival is not always due to its fidelity to itself, but to the multiple betrayals that demand its need for adaptation.
