Installation 1:2001

Piazza della Repubblica, Firenze, Italy

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Installation 1:2001

Piazza della Repubblica, Firenze, Italy

Type

Educational › Library

YEAR

2001

Casagrande & Rintala for Florence Biennale 2001.We started to collect religious, political and philosophical books from all over the world, even from North Korea. We would use the books for a circular wall construction so that the title back would be facing outwards and white paper inwards.After one year of collecting 15.000 books they were taken to the Piazza Della Republica in Florence, Italy. (Installation 1:2001, Casagrande & Rintala, Firenze Biennale of Contemporary Art 2001) This is the birthplace of the Renaissance and also the Futurist movement.The title backs are out so you can go round the circular wall and where is Bible and where is Koran, where is Dao Te-Chin and where is Das Kapital.There is a door where you can enter to the interior of the work. Inside everything becomes white paper. You can no longer tell where is Bible or where is Koran. The work is a ruin dominated by human nature. The books are quite ultimate representations of human mind and the feeling of this nature is quite thick in this construction.As I told you we collected these books for one year and it took two weeks to build the wall. Al the time during these two weeks people were asking us, what are you going to do with the books? They asked if they could get a book and we said no, we want to finish the work first. People were very annoyed when they got no clear answers why we are building a wall of books. They felt very personal with the work. After the wall was finished we went to hotel and got drunk.After coming back to the site after a couple of days this is what we found. All the books were gone. From the video of the security camera of the restaurant Giubbe Rosse behind the work we could see what had happened. A lot of people were staring at the work and talking. Then a man with a suitcase was passing by and stopped to see if he could get a book from the wall. Of course he could and so he did. When the rest of the people saw this man getting a book, all the crowd attacked the work and ripped it to pieces. You could see grandfathers running away with five kilos of Lenin in Lithuanian or some other language they could never read. They had to get the books. Because of this anarchic and spontaneous reaction of the public we were given the first prize of the Firenze Biennale, the Lorenzo Il Magnifico award.