For twenty years I have worked on books without destroying them.
In recent weeks, it has been reported that Amazon is purchasing large quantities of physical volumes — used, rare, sometimes out of print — in order to cut off their bindings, separate and scan their pages, and ultimately destroy them. What remains of the book is whatever can be extracted, archived, and transformed into data. The text survives. The book disappears.
This is a distinction that has run through my work for more than twenty years.
I have compressed, overwritten, and layered thousands of pages. I have transformed books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and newspapers into columns, walls, stairs, foundations, paths. I have taken writing to the limit of its legibility, to the point where the word ceases to be solely meaning and returns to being sign, surface, matter.
I have never erased a single book, a single letter.
In my works the text may become illegible, but nothing is taken away. Every word continues to be there. The paper, the binding, the weight, the thickness, the smell, the imperfections, the time spent in someone’s hands remain. Even what we can no longer read remains.
From “The Columns of Knowledge” to “The Stairs of Knowledge,” from works constructed through overwriting to the most recent works, the book has never been for me a simple container of information. It is a body. And like every body, it carries with it something that cannot be entirely translated, duplicated, or converted into information.
The question, then, is not to nostalgically oppose paper and digital. I am not interested in defending the book because it belongs to the past. I am interested in what happens when we think that the content of a thing can be preserved by eliminating its body.
Because content never fully coincides with what we can extract from it.
A book is certainly the words it contains. But it is also matter, volume, weight, smell, deterioration, provenance, the succession or chaos of its pages, the trace of those who have owned it and passed through it. It is the physical presence of memory; it can transform—in fact, it is born to transform itself and to transform.
Twenty years ago, from a certain point of view, this research might have appeared as a reflection on language, knowledge, and their limits: on the distance between word and thing, between signifier and signified, between presence and absence.
Today that distance has also taken on a concrete, technological, and industrial dimension.
I did not begin this work to respond to what Amazon is doing today. What is happening today gives concrete form to one of the many questions my work has been posing for twenty years.