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Alicia Martin – Book Art Installations

By August 19, 2015May 22nd, 2016Arty

Biografias

You turn the corner and are greeted by the sight of 5,000 books cascading from a first floor window and plummeting into the street below; have you died and gone to Heaven? Sadly, no.



What you are actually seeing here are photographs of a series of art installations by Spanish artist Alicia Martin; she’s a bit of an enigma and unusually for this day and age very little information is available other than she’s from Madrid and was born in 1964.

The first of her works I came across, consists of three art installations, each consisting of over 5,000 books but they are by no means all she has done. These are the three installations that make up the Biografias series.

A flow of books cascades from the first floor of an ancient fort in Madrid and arcs over a moat to pour onto the ground below.

Another seems to explode upwards, shooting high into the air and disappearing into the building above; this piece is called The Papier Biennale and was completed in 2012.

And the final piece falls to the floor from the window of Casa De America, contained only by the building’s ornate fencing.



Other works

She also has a number of other book based art installations to her name, all massive pieces and all of a similar ilk. Wired to a central framework to offer the stability and strength required to support such huge weights and yet with the pages and covers left free to ruffle and flap in the breeze.

I’ve always been a bit of a puritan when it comes to books, I twitch whenever I see them used for anything other than reading but I’m becoming less draconian, more accepting, and if these books are destined to be pulped, why not make use of them.

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