Forge a living book

from paper to wood remembers
from the crease barb bark
of summer storms
tree chains
of the trunk that bends high
with the accumulated weight of the birds
a book, paper on paper
Ana Estaregui

Forging a living book – a platform disputed here by organic forms, whose cognition takes place in the field of life cycles. To found a book devoid of utterances, in the search for an object in metamorphosis, a creature both of vegetal reality and emerging from fictional speculation. To desecrate the book: manipulate it, cut it, paste it, burn it, paint it; not to destroy it, but to go beyond and below its Enlightenment project, not to enclose the political possibilities of language in the canon of the word.

In the corridor of Galeria Lume, there are a series of sectioned books, joined one by one. Unable to access your content. We don’t know where they came from, what they say, what program they institute – in reality, none of that matters. Here, they present themselves as softened, flaccid shelf blades. Some, shaped by their own weight and gravity, hang like tongues, subverting the assumptions of permanence and solidity. They evoke susceptibility and mutability, in addition to the direct suggestion to organic processes, of bodily qualities. It is a series that seems to be the unfolding of previous works by the artist, especially the installations with sliced ​​and glued books, previously placed directly on the floor. This time, however, we speak of a radicalization of that procedure, because now they are the remains of books that crumble, spilling out charmingly before us, clamoring for other uses between nuances of white and yellow; old and new pages. Others, made from smaller cuts, constitute circular shapes as hybrid and irregular pulleys.

The rigidity of the bookshelf and library gives way to the sinuosity of a body-book that wishes to recall its vegetal origin, to engage with a distant, primeval memory. These Bibliomorphs sprawl along the wall like organisms that chart and negotiate routes that are capable of harboring their growth. Perhaps it would be possible to imagine them gradually taking over the entire gallery as a great score that claims this architecture for itself in the same measure as it abandons words in half – after all, the babble of its meaning is different, only glimpsed, never fully stated.

In the exhibition room, the sectioned shelves once again occupy the walls with works from the Biblioteca por Vir series, already known in the artist’s trajectory. It is a work whose ambiguity is central: water, fire and mineral make up the elements that we see there, although each one plays a different role. The scorched residue of gunpowder on the surface denotes an interference between control and lack of control, between aggression and care. It is as if Dupin produced small scars on these books, inviting us to imagine the course of his gestures and the biography of these objects. In addition, there are virtuous watercolors with botanical motifs, reminding us of the practice of traveling artists and scientific expeditions that helped to build the tropical imagination and its clichés. Finally, gilding details, in addition to a strong aesthetic appeal, mark the book as a distinct and precious object, an item that has been the domain of cultural elites throughout its history. They are pieces that induce us to necessarily contradictory stimuli (they are beautiful and destructive, fascinating and immoral) and resist any univocal meaning. Hence, there are many ambivalences: ideas historically associated with the book such as perpetuity (a kind of historical invulnerability) and credibility (as a repository of truth and knowledge) are contested by a title that suggests that the Library by Vir is, in in reality, a kind of plant recovery that spreads across these surfaces. Contrary to scientific rigor and cataloging, these stems and leaves appear on books as ungovernable organisms, putting in check this device centered on the empire of reason. In its place, we envision new alliances between species and worlds inhabited by porous, hybrid and multiple beings that reaffirm a sense of kinship between the organic and the inorganic, the animate and the inanimate, in the desire to found other horizons and rearrange relationships between the living and the living. extra-living. The to come is, after all, a great forest. If every book was, in its own way, a tree, the future is therefore a return, which makes past and future inseparable categories; a single process of prospection and retrospection, of remembrance and simultaneous becoming.

Pierre Bourdieu once said that “a book changes because it does not change when the world changes”. Perhaps Lucas Dupin disagrees with him. What there is here, in the whole set of works, is the claim of an eminently vulnerable book, capable of absorbing the transformations not only of its surroundings, but of its time. A book in search of recognition of a stranger, an Other, within itself.

Pollyanna Quintella