DIDDCC 2019
DIDDCC invites postgraduate, master and doctorate students in Art History, Fine Arts, Humanities, Communication and Library Sciences to take part.
Since Ramón Llull and his thinking machine, Lasswitz, Borges, Carroll, Zweig, among others, have built an imaginary of the total library, an inhuman library able to embrace the whole world and memory. But, given its mere existence, every library (like any collection) also evokes its shadow: another greater library with those documents not included, or those that are lost in the apparent order.
DIDDCC is a space for study that researches into the CA2M and ARCO collections. The first course of DIDDCC focused specifically on the collection and its forms of exhibition, while the second course centred on its diffusion and communication, proposing critical strategies to investigate the ways in which collections are published. In this latest course, we wish to take a look at the archive and the library, those ramifications of the collection that provide support for its study through documents and publications. These not only create a framework for investigation, but also comprise an independent body of collection able to embrace other nuances, formats and situations in present-day creation. Under this premise, we will work with the holdings of the library, as well as how to rethink its uses and the space in which it is housed, questioning the mechanisms for its classification, visibility and display, as well as the specific problems affecting the public library specialised in contemporary art.
Underlying the creation of any public collection is not only an educational mission, but also a desire to represent a world in a specific place, to embrace and to put order on it. Representational logics are being questioned in contemporaneity, establishing a critical epistemological relationship with institutions of learning, their collections and their ways of narrating themselves. However, far from a place of clarity, the library has, in the shared imaginary, been the stage setting of mystery par excellence, somewhere between the labyrinth and the riddle. It is this questioning capacity that we wish to explore, asking ourselves what a bibliographic collection could and should be. To this end, we will step out of the museum and enter into spaces for which it might be possible to invent a new definition of the library. We will delve into large, private and strange collections in order to think about what is hiding beneath the very act of collecting. We will intervene in and construct spaces in the company of artists who have opened up room to imagine the library as physical form and a form of ordering. Together librarians / publishers / archivists will think about what is involved in the continuous rubbing shoulders of book covers, those skins that cover bodies of pages coexisting in the same place.
Participants will have access to collections of the library as well as visits to other public and private libraries, and will also take part in encounters with artists and other contemporary art agents who will provide the course with structure.