I almost don’t know anyone anymore who has a lot of books at home. It’s like as soon as we started to get those digitalized books on our computers, we stopped stocking up on regular books. As a matter of fact, we took them out of our homes completely. The question is really, what did we do with them? Did we store them somewhere in our basement or maybe even in the attic? I don’t know anymore because it seems there would then be a lot of books hiding away somewhere never to see the light again, probably.
Why even store them if we are not going to read them later? That’s another question that I think we’ll have to live with for a while. Maybe our grandchildren will dig up our belongings when we are no longer here, only to discover that they have some rare classics they can sell on eBay. The idea is uncanny and a little intriguing of you ask me.
However, since most of the books out there are probably never going to become valuable in any huge kind of way, we might as well use them for something other than reading them, right? Well, that’s exactly what artist Marta Minujin did in Buenos Aires. It has been dubbed the Book Capital of 2011, and to honor it, Marta built an 82 foot Tower of Babel. The whole build consists of over 30,000 books that will probably not be used again after this quite epic build.
The books that were used were written in several languages, which I am sure stands for something (unity maybe), but I haven’t been able to research that completely. Even if I did, I am sure this article would become way too long to keep you focused anyway. So instead of pondering the detailed information that the artist compiled in an attempt to create the ultimate art installation, we can just have a look at it and agree that it is in fact… well, epic!
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