Lara Favaretto: Momentary Monument - The Library

Tessa Giblin curated the exhibition of Lara Favaretto (b. 1973, Treviso, Italy), which included producing 'Momentary Monument - The Library' at Talbot Rice Gallery. This was a large scale bookshelf sculpture, that required sourcing thousands of used books from local bookshops, or sourcing donations, and presenting them to the artists to be reduced to a selection of 2,488 books. Images were then selected by the artist from her personal archive, and then placed inside each of the books as selected by the artist. These were all then placed on the bookshelf, and over the duration of the exhibition, accompanied by various engagment activities, visiting members of the public were able to engage with the artwork by taking a book away with them. This was part of a series of artworks by Lara Favaretto. The Momentary Monuments series reflected upon the impermanence of memory, and the idea of a monument being something that could be dispersed, temporary or destructive.

Many of Favaretto's works derived from her large archive of images, some of which were distributed through the books. It began in 1994 and eventually contained over 24,000 images. It was organized around 'keywords' that the artist deemed important to understanding the present moment. In this case, Favaretto used her archive to save books that were due to be destroyed. Visitors could leaf through the library and take a book of their choosing, but as the books were taken away, the 'monument' was effectively dismantled.

This work destabilised ideas about knowledge. From a monolithic form that reinforced a sense of inaccessible information, it emptied out to become, in theory, more manageable but simultaneously incomplete. At the same time, the artist's archive was dispersed, carried by the books it had saved into people's homes across Edinburgh and beyond. In this way, it became something other than a typical archive (a usable, centralized repository of information). And the books, once deemed defunct, took on a new life that might have engendered new ideas outside the institutions they once served. Favaretto had previously represented thought as mist—something opaque and concealing—and here, this dispersed library became something like an invisible cloud resource.