La Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA

The work La Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA consists of articulating and making visible, through the placement of this work in the Nicanor Parra Library-UDP, the traumatic persistence that signifies the incompleteness of Chile’s recent history, which this work intends to point out but also to encourage to accept and heal.

The La Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA, is a work that consists of the permanent intervention of the empty shelves of the Library with 330 “books” that compile the files that the USA declassified about Chile, corresponding to the years 1968-1992, in what was called the “CHILE DECLASSIFICATION PROJECT”, carried out between the years 1998 and 2000.

In the empty cabinet on the second floor of the Nicanor Parra Library, which has 35 gray shelves, the books belonging to this work will be organized in 10 backlit shelves, forming a horizontal line of approximately 7 meters, above the shelf that says: “LEAVE YOUR CONSULTED BOOKS HERE”.

The hypothesis that led me to make the first work of this series in 2010 was the desperation of realizing that, ten years after its declassification, the information in the archives was not part of the documents consulted and contrasted to write the historical “versions” of Chile in their accounts of the decades of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

The Biblioteca de la No-Historia consisted in intervening 3 Ulises bookstores in Santiago, with “books” that contained these files classified as secret, and that, when declassified and removed from that condition, presented two main characteristics: first, the great volume of information (it is said that it is the foreign country about which the USA has declassified more files) and second, the great amount of censorship that they present through redactions. Two conditions that led me to decide for this material device “books”, exhibited and available to the public in bookstores, and that could be taken in exchange for an answer to the question: “what space will you assign to this book” and later “what are you going to do with this book?

Thus -and that is why I say desperation- in a hysterical-historical gesture, I decided to formally transform into “books” an archival material that was not in books. Understanding that, basically, a book is the result of an authorial or disciplinary elaboration on human issues that matter and move us, a book is a civilizing exercise of resistance in the face of barbarism. While an archive, on the contrary, is only the possibility of information that may or may not serve for the formulation of knowledge. In this sense, the archive is a material that comes from barbarism and is thus a raw, crude and infamous material.

Through this new proposal of La Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA, the emptiness of the shelves that surround the books made of archival documents, is presented as the possibility of thinking a more optimistic and hopeful device about the ethical problem that this material poses for the formulation and the need of national History in the future. The proposal is that, through the discipline of librarianship, the shelves will be filled in the future and in an unpredictable manner, with those books that have been and will be written to formulate narratives, analyses and poetics that will serve as an elaboration or background of this archival material, and therefore as an elaboration of the events that took place in Chile in the last half of the twentieth century.

In this way, I imagine that the bibliographic classification system by subject, author, or title of the library, which also represents the disciplines in the work of collective knowledge -through a library catalogue that will be constantly updated- will provide the possibility of organizing and allowing access to this writing on the erasure of the history of Chile and its citizens. The empty shelves will have the signage destined to history, sociology, art, psychology, journalism, poetry, literature, etc., with the consequent universal decimal classification of the Library system.

Likewise, the shelves will also contain the books of the Recovered Library Project, which consists of “the recovery of rescued books, or symbolically recovered, those that could not be “saved” from burning, destruction or concealment, since many books, due to fear or repression, were burned, hidden or buried in thousands of Chilean homes and institutions, creating a spectrum of authors, titles and silenced themes, impossible to specify and quantify. Millions of books were burned or destroyed, from fables to universal literature, including Latin American writers or simply educational, cultural, philosophical or political publications”.

Through these two actions, Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA and Biblioteca Recuperada we will question the past and create awareness towards the future, about the writing/erasure of History in Chile, its cultural history, and its future intellectual production.

DIFFUSION VIDEO
Biblioteca Recuperada UDP/ Biblioteca Nicanor Parra

Año:
Tipo de Investigación:
exhibición:
Biblioteca Nicanor Parra de la Universidad Diego Portales

COLLECTIVE EXHIBITION
“BIBLIOTECA RECUPERADA: LIBROS QUEMADOS Y ESCONDIDOS A 40 AÑOS DEL GOLPE” (RECOVERED LIBRARY: BURNT AND HIDDEN BOOKS 40 YEARS AFTER THE COUP)

CURATED BY: RAMÓN CASTILLO

ciudad:
Santiago
país:
Chile
Especificación:
  • La Biblioteca de la No-Historia/ PRUEBA DE ARTISTA (The No-History’s Library/ARTIST’S TRIAL)
    330 books with declassified files arranged on 10 backlit shelves
Tipo de proyecto:
tipo de obra: