'The Parthenon of Forbidden Books'
Marta Minujin she prefers bars to restaurants (with their cutlery and her conventions), sailboats to motor boats, happenings to theater... She moves in the spontaneous, the fleeting, the monumental and the participatory. She has lived and succeeded as an artist in New York Y Paris but now her routine is between airplanes and her great Buenos Aires studio.
Her latest art installation in progress, Parthenon of forbidden books , she emerges in a place full of memory, the Friedrichplatz from Kassel (where The Nazis burned almost 2,000 books in 1933. as part of the strategy Action against the anti-German spirit), and with an expiration date: September 17. From that day on, travelers and the curious will be able to take one of the books.
“ Culture is instant but memory is much more ephemeral than before ”, Explains one of the most influential contemporary Argentine artists of her generation.
“It is very different to read a book, to have it in your hands, to open a page… it makes you think much more than if you read an ebook or a Tablet, according to my experience. the other information, Wikipedia culture, it's much more superficial . You meet an elderly person who has a brutal memory and who knows the Internet generation what memory they will have if they continue to learn things like this, ”she reflects.
Marta Minujín talking about her work in Kassel
She speaks very fast, determined and excited. “It is the work that has made me happiest in my life because it is a wonderful work, that I never thought of finishing it, of doing it, because it was so pharaonic… and it was done. I think it's an impossible work of art ”, She tells Traveler through a telephone interview from her studio in Buenos Aires.
The angles, edges and volumes of this piece that is part of the Documenta 14 quinquennial festival reflect the exact measurements of the Parthenon in Athens. “It is a metallic structure that measures 70 meters, by 35, by 22 and inside it has a large, empty space with lights to philosophize and think . It has 48 columns 17 meters high and the entire work is covered by forbidden books, ”she describes.
The new Parthenon of forbidden books by Marta Minujín can be seen at the documenta 14 festival
A skeleton that holds works donated from Argentina, Spain, Germany, the United States, France... and that were silenced by censorship, political interests and the will to condition the thinking of the masses. When walking among its columns you will come across: In Praise of Madness , of Erasmus; Bernarda Alba's house , by Federico García Lorca; Splendor , by Goethe, Madame Bovary , by Gustavo Flaubert; Thirst , by Henri Bernstein; Tropic of Capricorn , by Henry Miller or Moby-Dick , by Hermann Melville.
The classification of donations has been carried out with the collaboration of Dr. Nikola Roßbach Florian Gassner , Professor of Literature at the University of Kassel. Here you can consult some of the works classified by year of prohibition, reason and source with which to compare the information.
You can see it until September 17
“IT IS THE PARTHENON FOR PEACE”
Restless and disruptive, the artist who collaborated with Andy Warhol in the action Payment of the foreign debt with corn, Latin American gold (1985) she works in the house where she was born, a 900-square-meter loft-studio that she designed after joining four chorizo houses (a type of construction typical of Buenos Aires and Rosario) in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Cristobal.
At 74 years old, she explains that for her Buenos Aires is synonymous with Jacarandá and Palos Borrachos _(Ceiba speciosa) _, “it is a city that has many trees, especially Avenida 9 de Julio”.
What advice would you give to young women, you who have created your own path outside of academia? “I would tell young women to keep creating, to follow their inner cues and look as little as possible at other people's art . That they do what they do themselves but that they are not informed all the time, the excess of information leads to disinformation, then everything is in a bag and nothing is understood”.
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