The Word Burned | The Cellar
When ISIS militants took control of Mosul, Iraq in 2014, they burned down its university library destroying thousands of books and manuscripts dating back to the Ottoman era. Following the liberation of the city in 2017, former students and academics saved around 2,000 volumes from the ashes of the library. Their work to restore and rebuild the library continues.
The Word Drowned | West Turret Bathroom
The ‘Acqua Alta’ or ‘High Water’ are exceptionally high tides that occur in autumn and spring in the North Adriatic and cause flooding across Venice. As a result, the Libreria Acqua Alta bookshop stores their volumes in basins, bathtubs and even a full size Venetian gondola, ensuring that when the tides come in, their precious contents remain safe.
The people in the installation represent life, and the books upholding the city and the people. There is an energy and defiance and humanity in the little people. They ask questions of culture and how much culture elevates and supports us, and how lost we might be without it.
The Word Superseded | Chinese Dressing Room
The transition from paper maps and charts to online and satellite GPS-based services that can be updated remotely has resulted in physical documents becoming increasingly redundant. Blickling Estate’s second-hand bookshop receives many donations of A-Zs, maps and charts, many of which we struggle to sell as they are out of date and have become replaced by digital forms. The audio is sat nav instructions to juxtapose with the physical map.
The Word Defiant | Long Gallery Library
Blickling holds the most significant book collection cared for by the National Trust. The estimated 12,500 volumes were assembled by Sir Richard Ellys and brought to Blickling in the early eighteenth century by Ellys’ cousin Sir John Hobart, 1st Earl of Buckinghamshire. The books continue to be the subject of a major conservation and re-assessment project. Blickling’s magnificent library represents books defiant in the face of the threats represented in the previous six installations.
The sound represents the start and culmination of language, fragments of language that build into a cacophony. It is also intended to give a sense of movement, urgency, rushing and life. All the books you see were rescued from being pulped and their useful life extended to the end of October.