ONTOLOGY AND BEAUTY. Intervention by Laura Pérez

On the occasion of the International Day of Libraries, the CGAC library is hosting an artistic intervention by Lourdes Pérez, inviting us to break with the established order and adopt a different approach in exploring the network of relationships between authors, institutions and the artists shaping it.

Ontology and Bearuty is an intervention conceived within the framework of the workshop Painting Space, Thinking Place given by the artist Almudena Fernández Fariña in November 2023. The idea was simple: working with different techniques in the physical space of the CGAC to showcase any institutional, political or artistic aspects the museum may have.

With a degree in geography and history from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and librarian by profession, Lourdes Pérez precisely chose the library and the collection it houses to design her artistic initiative. Her research is based on a critique of the traditional or classic notion of the library as a comfortable, sterile space whose purpose is to safeguard and preserve knowledge. Thus understood, the library ‘bears all the burden of a Foucauldian dispositif,’ and this renders it impervious to other types of unusual or unexpected connections that favour wonder and creation.

But destroying the library means not only dismantling its systems of knowledge, its classifications, statements and forms of visualisation, but also imagining others to come. Lourdes Pérez’s intervention offers us the opportunity to establish new bonds with the works of her catalogue, reviewing certain books and diving into the epistemological limits of its collections. Only thus can the fissures of a knowledge positioned in the centre be revealed.

Ontology and Beauty is, above all, a living project that calls for the active engagement of readers, encouraging them to imagine alternatives and to self-organise in order to face the violence imposed by the power structures in all areas of the contemporary world.

LOURDES PÉREZ (Lugo, 1967) has a degree in Geography and History from the University of Santiago de Compostela and works as a librarian at the aforementioned university.

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF LIBRARIES

Since 1997, every 24 October the International Day of Libraries is celebrated to commemorate the Sarajevo National Library, which was set on fire in 1992 during the Balkans War. The slogan this year, 'For a sustainable future’, aims to highlight the key role of all types of libraries (public, school, university, specialised, and national/regional) in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda.