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The Wall and The Books: 987 Words Stolen from a Library, 2002
Digital print
Exhibition copy
Courtesy of the artist
The Wall and the Books: 987 Words Stolen from a Library is a commentary on Jorge Luis Borges’ essay, which reflected on the self-proclaimed First Emperor of China. The construction of the Great Wall, the destruction of many books written before his reign and the standardization of written Chinese have all been attributed to Qin Shi Huang. Borges attempted to understand Qin Shi Huang’s reasoning and the relationship between these actions. Barriers and books are different mechanisms for making things last; walls and tongues can define territories and help establish origins. In this sense, the construction of history depends on the destruction of the past, a past that must be annihilated so that the following period can be validated as absolute. Each monument contains a shadow: the negation of what was built there before.
For this piece, Castillo Deball sought and extracted each one of the 987 words that make up the Borges essay from different books found in the library of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands. This wall of paper accounts for the spaces that have now been left behind in these books and how their words have been used to tell another story.
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