Library

When moving out of its former seat, the Faculty of Pharmacy took all the movables, but the fixed elements were left. As a result, all that which decorated the interiors and contributed to the special atmosphere of the building remained in its place. We could therefore come across old lab rooms without their equipment, empty warehouses and a library devoid of books. Seeing a library with no books is an unusual sight – it was probably the most beautiful, charming and stylish place in the building, although we rarely saw it without its constituent element that endowed it with meaning.
The artists decided to fill the empty shelves with another abandoned material – bricks. In this way, they created an immobile and useless library which retained its visual quality but did not offer the possibility of using the ‘tomes.’ It was an impossible library that did not offer real knowledge – only a suggestion or an association with knowledge.
In days when an ever increasing part of knowledge and scientific materials is available by electronic means, e-readers and databases, the real importance of a library as a repository of knowledge and the resulting charm seem to vanish. The abandoned and petrified library of the Faculty of Pharmacy was a stark reminder of this.

> Antoni Burzyński

 

photo: Peter Kreibich