We’ve covered Matej Kren’s amazing feats of book-stacking before, but his ‘Scanner’ installation may be one of the most magnificent. Installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna (MAMbo) in Italy, the piece is a gigantic tunnel of books that is meant to inspire reflection, impose greatness, and confuse perspective. Decked out with mirrors and thousands of books, “Scanner” is a new read on how we experience place.
Kren created “Scanner” specifically for MAMbo in collaboration with the Slovakian Centre for Information on Literature. The installation is the seminal event of a local children’s book fair — some of us may have been raised to treat books like books and only books, but Kren manages to inspire literary reverence by using books as building materials. However intellectually metaphorical that may sound, it’s a physical truth.
Says MAMbo: The narrow inside space, multiplied and complicated by mirrors, evoke a sensation of sublime terror, an alteration referring to a puzzling infinity itself created to destabilize conventional spatial habits. Mirrors become an instrument to create illusion and, at the same time, to unmask it. Since the public can easily see themselves reflected in a false infinite – thus discovering the illusion – the problem becomes the latency of perception.
Sounds very intellectually satisfying.
Source: inhabitat.com
