A library is a place that holds books. Lots of books. These books hold knowledge. The knowledge of these books influences people’s decisions and sometimes even their lives. What is the most influential book you’ve ever read? That book may mean nothing to another person. In the library last Thursday when surrounded by books and a mission to build a wall with them this is what I was thinking about. From this process we decided to select books based on space, place and general knowledge. Some of these books I had read, others I had not but if some one sees a book in our wall and it means something to them they may come and investigate.
We built the wall up against the library window with a gap that people could look into and see what we were doing. Three hours and one hundred and forty books later one of the walls was finished. The aim of this was to look at how the finished product would look as we want both of the windows in our selected site (under the stairs) to be covered with a circle cut out so people can look in. We needed to see how long it took to build too – it took a lot longer then we first imagined it would.
Here was the finished product:
From doing this we realised the performativity of collecting the books, taking them to our site and building the wall. We could hear a lot of people talking to each other asking what we were doing and a lot of people we watching us too. They must have seen something in our actions to give us their attention. We thought about putting this into our final performance as if people see us collecting the books they may be more likely to interact with us and then come to our site to see what we are doing. As we are having an interactive installation if the audience interacted with us as we were setting up our space they will become part of the performance too blurring the lines between “performers” and “audience”.
Forced Entertainment performed a site specific piece called Dreams’ Winter in 1994 at the Manchester Central Library. Tim Etchells the director said “we were drawn to the idea of animating the stories and secrets contained in all the books, as well as conjuring the ghosts of past library users”(Cranitch, 1994) this is pertinent for our performance. We are using the books and the knowledge inside them yet looking back at the past of the library and what it was before it was a library. The lives of those people are as important as the lives of the current users. As they will all become history one day.
