ART CITIES:Barcelona-Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer

Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer first met in 2001. An experimental internet project, “The Beehive”, was released in 2005, which lasted for two years and eventually led to the collaborative project “The Infinite Library”, an ongoing book project which is primarily an expanding archive of books, each created out of pages of one or more found books and bound anew. Today, 75 books exist. An online catalogue serves as a preliminary index.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fabra i Coats Archive

“The Infinite Library” is an expanding archive of books, made through the recombination of pages from one or more found publications dating from 1890 up to the 1980s. Pictures and pages are brought together to shape yet another whole. The concept for each new volume develops gradually, starting from the content of the original book and the associations that unfold in the process of making. Through empirical, conceptual or poetic criteria. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel”, the artists imagine the library as a space of all possible arrangements and combinations, serving as a metaphor for the universe, in which humanity is on an endless search for knowledge. At Fabra i Coats, “The Infinite Library” is presented over two floors. The artists have designed 18 identical vitrines, inside which 100 books are on view, exhibited across the entire space of the 2nd floor. On the 3rd floor, Epaminonda and Cramer are launching a new durational work, that will take a place every day during the opening hours over the course of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to take part, welcomed by a representative of “The Infinite Library” who guides each person, one at a time, to a desk placed inside the exhibition space. The visitor is then asked to inscribe his/her signature onto a page of a new volume that the artists have created and which they consider a “living’ sculpture: their largest book to date”. Each visitor, by agreeing to sign the book with his/her name or a pseudonym, becomes part of its making, and in return is be given a unique certificate of participation. The first volume will be completed at the end of the exhibition and will remain thereafter closed and displayed as such in the future. In this exhibition, like in a library, the acts of looking and reading are on display, as actions rooted in imagination and reflection. In that sense, the individual and shared experience that takes place on the second floor gives rise, on the third, to a new expository condition, which generates a new book. The collection as a fetishistic ensemble encounters its immaterial, imaginary or critical nature. Contrasting with the calculated staging of history, seeing how this inventory of books participates in the present gives us a vision of art as everything it is and can be: an inexhaustible text that unfolds among the works. That is its boundlessness, represented in the perpetual action that records a secret collection of names, the multiple and unknown testimony of the literary community—that “unavowable community” referred to by Maurice Blanchot. And that is also the visitors’ commitment and emancipation; they must redefine their role in this open conversation.

Info: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona – Fabra i Coats, c/ Sant Adrià, 20, Barcelona, Duration: 15/2-24/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-15:00, www.barcelona.cat