Cornette de St Cyr Auction, Bruxelles - March 2014

Unpacking my library #2 : The Collection

"Unpacking my library", echoing Walter Benjamin’s book, is a proposition by Anne-Laure Chamboissier and Christophe Daviet-Thery, revolving around the library as a meeting place, a place of dialogue, where all knowledge is compared, which caused Jorge Luis Borges to say: "I’ve always imagined that paradise would be a sort of library". In many respects, this project organized around the library is also literary. Through its title borrowed from Walter Benjamin.

Through its mobility which calls to mind Elias Canetti’s professor Peter Kien in Auto-da-fé, who always carried on him a piece of his library. And lastly, through its nature, the library which inevitably conjures up Jorge Luis Borges.

Required to move and therefore to be reactivated, the content of this library varies, is enriched depending on its wanderings and of the context in which it appears, in this case an auction house, a space where art works are exhibited and scattered.

Presented in this manner, this second library is structured around the theme of collection which becomes the substance of the piece as seen with Christian Marclay or Allen Ruppersberg… or its subject when it is perceived as accumulation with an encyclopedic intent, reminding one of Mark Dion or Battia Sutter’s curiosity cabinets.

If the collection is composed of objects, it is also evocative of notions such as envy, desire, frustration and fetichism, which are ironically pointed out by Stefan Brüggeman in his sentence : "This work is realised when it is burned", exhorting the collector to destroy the work, or Yann Sérandour and his "Incomplete Open Cube".

Cornette de St Cyr Auction
Chaussée de Charleroi, 89
1060 Bruxelles

a proposition by Anne-Laure Chamboissier and Christophe Daviet-Thery
www.daviet-thery.fr

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