Library of the Earth | Marianna Dellekamp

From august 31st through october 12th, 2019

The Biblioteca de la Tierra (Library of the Earth) is the biggest library in the world. It contains only 450 volumes, but it is not the number of books that makes it the largest library that could potentially exist, but the fact that it is the material representation of the elements that constitute the Earth itself. Serving as a container of the Earth (and of its earth), of its geographies, of its coastlines, forests, jungles, and mountains, but also of the sum of its inhabitants (past, present, and future), it has the potential of containing all the stories, both true and false, that have ever been told, and that will continue to be told until the end of days. Every story: every amorous encounter, the happiness of every birth, the tragedy of every misfortune, the pain of every sickness, and the final liberation of death.

Dellekamp’s library belongs to the world  of the Aleph in the story by Borges, or of that encyclopedia volume devoted to a country that never existed, which provided an account of its climate, its rivers and fields, its woodlands –whether pine forests or tropical jungles–, the number of its inhabitants and the very last child born in it.

It is the dwellers on this common planet who make up, as its various authors, the variety and richness of the Library. From 2008 to the present, the artist has been receiving contributions from others wishing also to participate, in the hope perhaps of making our existence a little less banal. Let a record remain of the fact that we were inhabitants of the third planet in the solar system, located in the arm of Orion, one of the spiraling coils of the Milky Way. Let it be known that we once bathed in its waters and were warmed by its sunlight.