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Totems
series of sculptures made of various books
dimensions variable
2015

We grew up in a scripted world, built from alphabet and ruled by the supreme institution of the "book". Our minds were hypnothised by the ubiquitousness of text and kept hostages in the realm of inscribed wisdom. The written word is our first and last instance, it is the go-to authority, an undisputable source of knowledge. Whatever is printed becomes "truth"; anything off the printed record is dubious.
Books are one of the strongest agents that shape our consciousness. Sacred objects, we gather them religiously, we fetishise them, carrying them around as talismans, displaying them in shelves as trophies, as confirmations of our class belonging, as tokens of our intellectual aspirations. Books explain the surrounding world to us, they make all experiences indirect and all knowledge mediated. Text is a veil between us and reality, between us and our bodies, between us and ourselves. Books are mirrors in which we don't see ourselves, placeholders for reality that expose us to one thousand and one imagined realities; they are strongholds for collective fictions that shape the objective world of matter, bodies and minds. We are made of text as much as we are made of our own experiences – we don't dare to think, feel or discover without reading about it first.
In an attempt to liberate ourselves from the dictatorship of the alphabet and from the hard-wired obedience to text, we try to disenchant the sacredness of books. As an experiment of defiance and an exercise in biblioclasm, we transform books through fire into totemic objects, into emblems of a self-help ritual. In a blasphemous celebration we turn books into warmth and energy, conjoin them with magic, and conjure them into a sort of protective objects.
Sculptured out of burned books, Totems are objects of veneration that embody the complex relationship of love, hate, scorn and awe that we carry towards the written word. They belong to a post-literate world where reading and the eye no longer remain the exclusive means through which knowledge is obtained and processed. This libricidic gesture is aimed toward the return to a broader, more balanced cognitive capacity that will allow acceptance of realities that are ineffable and unseen.