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{"id":161446,"date":"2017-01-15T19:50:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T00:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/?p=161446"},"modified":"2026-02-25T10:14:58","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:14:58","slug":"the-library-and-the-reconstruction-of-discarded-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/the-library-and-the-reconstruction-of-discarded-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Library and the Reconstruction of Discarded History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Accordingly, knowledge consumers become at the same time knowledge producers (\u201cprosumers\u201d), who are increasingly finding the public library to be an ideal environment for their creations. Notably, this is not limited to high technologies and digital literacy alone. Although it is fundamental to the process of making accessible to many a range of (almost professional) apps for inventing, managing, and exploiting, it also applies to handcrafting, reading, writing, painting, and playing music. The valence of contemporary libraries as performative spaces also lies in their enabling the convergence of a diversity of expressive tools, encouraging experimentation and \u201chybridization\u201d across different forms of creativity, producing new personal content that can be shared with the community.^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy<\/em> (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, the commonly held idea of the public library is still closely associated with its image as a repository for books and documents. This is not surprising, as libraries have accumulated (and continue to store) billions of documents, apparently ensuring that no written contribution ever made to culture and civilization is going to disappear. Libraries there\u00adfore must select which of these documents to make available to the public according to their current significance. By making such selections, libraries strongly contribute to the continuing construction and reconstruction of cultural memory by influencing the social playing field. Consciously or unconsciously, these choices shape the collective Bindung <\/em>that strives for cultural homogeneity under the guise of politically correct objective autonomy. The scope and mechanisms of a library\u2019s mission and programming cannot be dissociated from the current ideological context. Just like producers of culture, libraries always relate to the changing notion of \u201cworth\u201d in the prevailing socio-political environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Concrete Exhibition<\/em>, 2008, detail.
Photo : \u00a9 M\u00e1rta R\u00e1cz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This tension within the contemporary library\u200a\u2014\u200aat once a seminal place aiming to free individual and communal aspirations and an agency for subtle conditioning, these repositories with a pathological meaning ^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Here I use \u201cpathological\u201d in the same way that Aldo Rossi does in L\u2019Architectura della Citta<\/em> (Milan: Citt\u00e1 Studi Edizioni, 1966). Rossi distinguishes between monuments having an active significance for the city for they still house an urban program, and monuments without an active program but that are still essential to the city (for example the Alhambra in Granada). He defines the latter as \u201cpathological\u201d to the city. Similarly, the collections are \u201cpathological\u201d to the library: the collective imaginary cannot think of a library without thinking of books, while the library is not just books (passive) but knowledge (active)\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding a variety of possibilities.<\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200aprovides fertile ground for artistic investigations reflecting upon what has not <\/em>been selected, such as narratives told from a new perspective or deconstructions of official representations of culture.^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - For example, Little Warsaw, a Hungarian artist collective, organized almost a hundred statuettes and figurines borrowed from Hungarian public collections into an imagined battlefield for the exhibition The Battle of Inner Truth<\/em> at Trafo Gallery, Budapest. Creating new relationships through the displacement of these little icons raises essential questions regarding the representation of collective history: how is historical identity constructed? How do these masculine military objects transform thinking about heavily gendered narratives of history?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Blinken_Concrete_Exhibition\"$
Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Concrete Exhibition<\/em>, 2008, detail.
Photo : \u00a9 M\u00e1rta R\u00e1cz<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Post-socialist Hungary can serve here as an example. What happens if the current political power does not wish to process conflicting parts of history, or when once-essential documents suddenly are not taken out anymore? Whereas in the former Eastern Bloc it was impossible to read critiques of the Soviet regime, nowadays\u200a\u2014\u200atwenty-seven years after the change of political system\u200a\u2014\u200aSoviet \u201cbestsellers\u201d are gathering dust in most Hungarian libraries. The political shift has meant a cultural rupture with the Soviet models. In this process the Hungarian libraries can be seen as displays of the changing official knowledge (the notion of \u201cworth\u201d in the prevailing socio-political environment) and as displays of identity transitions toward the post-socialist Hungary. The shift from state socialism to capitalism began rapidly in Hungary, and yet it is not even close to being completed. It is still hard to say how Hungarian society relates to the socialist era; it takes time for a society to digest such big changes. In fact, personal and collective memories endure despite demolition of Soviet era statues and changes to street names.^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - David Clarke, \u201cCommunism and Memory Politics in the European Union,\u201d Central Europe Journal <\/em>12, no. 1 (2014): 109\u200a\u2014\u200a10.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Blinken_Concrete_Exhibition\"$
Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Concrete Exhibition<\/em>, installation view, Galeria Centralis, Budapest, 2008.
Photo : \u00a9 M\u00e1rta R\u00e1cz
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The contemporary library as performative environment facilitates collaborations among artists, historians, architects, and communities that revisit its collections from multiple angles. The case of the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA Archivum) is interesting in this regard. OSA Archivum is a library, archive, and research centre in Hungary that preserves Eastern Bloc history and plays an essential role in presenting layered narratives of the recent past. Although it functions as one of the world\u2019s largest repositories of Cold War, Radio Free Europe, and samizdat<\/em>^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - Samizdat was a form of self-published censored texts, passed among trusted friends in the Soviet bloc. Possessing and copying censored materials was strictly forbidden, and harsh punishment was meted out to those who were caught.<\/span> holdings, OSA Archivum also maintains major international documentation on human rights movements and serious human rights violations. OSA Archivum is part of the Open Society Foundations and, as such, part of the Central European University (CEU) complex. Together with the CEU, it curates and organizes numerous free public programs, including exhibitions in its central gallery in Budapest (Galeria Centralis), academic conferences, seminars, and performances. Even though the library is engaged principally with granting open access to essential documents of the former socio-political system, it lies outside of the Hungarian government\u2019s institutional system. Because it is a privately funded institute, it is independent of the ever-changing political milieu and cultural policies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
As a shelter for documents that have been marginalized because of their content or social background, OSA Archivum collects and reorganizes historical records for preservation, classification, collection, and sharing\u200a\u2014\u200aincluding unread books. Dead Library<\/em> (2012) was one of the most impressive projects of the series in OSA Archivum\u2019s performance space in Galeria Centralis. Jointly with the ELTE University Library, five thousand books that had not been borrowed since 1989 were selected. These books had been published in Hungary between 1945 and 1989, but nobody had read them at the university library for twenty-three years or more. What is the value of such a discarded collection? During the exhibition, visitors saw an installation that staged a typical image of a local library. \u201cThe 300-square-meter space is dominated by bookshelves, on which the books are arranged in the standard thematic order ranging from technical and agricultural works through youth lit\u00aderature to arts and fiction.\u201d^{10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 10 <\/a> - Dead Library<\/em> exhibition (2012), OSA Archivum, accessed September 1, 2016, http:\/\/www.osaarchivum.org\/press-room\/announcements\/Dead-Library\u2014-Books-Unread.<\/span> As visitors walked around the exhibition space, taking a careful look at the mass of books, an interesting title or a striking cover might attract their attention. A book might be transferred to the \u201crecommended readings\u201d shelf with a note such as, \u201cI recommend this book to sport fans, because you can find everything about the previous 40 years of Hungarian sport life\u201d (note by a ten-year-old pupil about a book titled 40 Years of Hungarian Sport<\/em> during a workshop organized for primary schools). Video installations in which art historians, writers, and sociologists were asked to choose seven books out of the thousands of unread documents, were also part of the exhibition. Watching these pre-recorded thoughts and personal memories visitors could learn about cultural policy mechanisms in the Soviet system, official and unofficial art, and the air of mystery that still prevails about the main characters of the Soviet regime. Dead Library <\/em>challenges our understanding and generates discourse about the timelessness of culture. It reveals the fragile temporality of history by exposing the helpless decay of its supposedly most solid expressions: written ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Blinken_DeadLibrary\"$
Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Dead Library \u2013 Books Unread<\/em>, 2012.
Photo : courtesy of Blinken OSA Archivum
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$\"Blinken_DeadLibrary\"$
Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Dead Library \u2013 Books Unread<\/em>, installation view, Galeria Centralis, Budapest, 2012.
Photo : courtesy of Blinken OSA Archivum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
OSA Archivum\u2019s exhibition Concrete <\/em>(2008) was more radical in its form than Dead Library<\/em>. Concrete<\/em> was built around a vast donation to the CEU by Radio Free Europe\u2019s research institute. How can artists reflect on books, offered for free to the public, most of which have lost all relevance over time? J\u00e1nos H\u00fcbler and Nemere Kerezsi, two PhD students at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts,^{11<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 11 <\/a> - Work supervised by the Hungarian artist Gy\u00f6rgy Jov\u00e1novics.<\/span> created a literally solid answer: they used two cubic metres of concrete and eighteen cubic metres of discarded books to form their installation. The controversial method of recycling questioned the nature of books as being a sacred medium of information, while at the same time constituting a monument to both the immortality of the past and the disintegration of eternal knowledge \u201cset in concrete.\u201d It was an unavoidable installation; visitors could not enter the exhibition space without stepping on the books. Instead of walking around and trying to read the title of the books, adults mainly stayed close to the edge, whereas children experienced and played with the material under their feet. It was a playground for children, but, as a graveyard for hundreds of books that could no longer be read, it offered a provocative experience to adults. Is The Complete Works of Stalin <\/em>in Albanian still an important book in Hungary? How unthinkable is it, nowadays, to entomb it in concrete? When the conventional context for storing information is changed, the way we look at books also changes. The installation created a radical statement that forced visitors to think about many aspects of collections, archives, and libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Blinken_DeadLibrary\"$
Blinken OSA Archivum<\/strong>
Dead Library \u2013 Books Unread<\/em>, 2012.
Photo : courtesy of Blinken OSA Archivum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Libraries hold essential databases of history and human knowledge, but they are also a medium that represents patterns of the political mechanism. The performative turn in their programming and understanding helps to free libraries\u2019 many dimensions from current dominations. However, libraries also form a dynamic platform for debates and reflections on current socio-political events. The inspiring examples of sensitive reflections on Hungary\u2019s socialist past show a conscious way of interpreting the former era\u2019s cultural heritage. Regardless of the mainstream discourse and the absolute rejection of the forty-five-year-long socialist period, the rediscovery and revitalization of cultural memory helps people to recover from a traumatic history and encourages them to think critically about their present by rereading their past. This is a primary task for the contemporary performative library. <\/p>\n
Blinken OSA Archivum, Olindo Caso, Zs\u00f3fia Bene<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its contemporary form, the library is an ever-changing [NOTE count=1]\u201cplatform,\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Richard David Lankes, Expect More: Demanding Better Libraries for Today\u2019s Complex World (Jamesville: Riland Press, 2012).[\/REF] a \u201csocial [NOTE count=2]infrastructure\u201d[\/NOTE][REF count=2]Shannon Mattern, \u201cLibrary as Infrastructure,\u201d Places Journal (June 2014), accessed August 23, 2016, https:\/\/placesjournal.org\/article\/library-as-infrastructure\/.[\/REF] that supports people, communities, and self-directed creativity from the bottom up. In their physical form, library collections are becoming less of a determining factor in the library\u2019s value. However these collections still house materials that feed individual explorations, both as content and as objects. The contemporary public library\u2019s mission includes four typical areas: learning space (explore), inspiration space (excite), meeting space (participate), and performative space [NOTE count=3](create).[\/NOTE][REF count=3]Henrik Jochumsen, Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen, and Dorte Skot-Hansen, \u201cThe Four Spaces\u200a\u2014\u200aA New Model for the Public Library,\u201d New Library World 113, no. 11\/12 (2012): 586\u200a\u2014\u200a97.[\/REF] The performative area has been booming in the last decade in response to the rise of the \u201cmaker movement\u201d (including makerspaces and fab labs), a\u00a0phenomenon encapsulated within the broader socio-economic turn toward a culture-embedded economy centred on design and [NOTE count=4]creativity.[\/NOTE][REF count=4]Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994); Pier Luigi Sacco, \u201cCulture 3.0: A New Perspective for the EU 2014\u200a\u2014\u200a2020 Structural Funds Programming,\u201d EENC\u200a\u2014\u200aEuropean Expert Network on Culture (Brussels: European Commission, 2011), accessed August 23, 2016, http:\/\/www.eenc.info\/eencdocs\/papers-2\/culture-3-0-\u2009% E2\u2009% 80\u2009% 93-a-new-perspective-for-the-eu-2014-2020-structural-funds-programming; George Ritzer, Paul Dean, and Nathan Jurgenson, \u201cThe Coming of the Age of the Prosumer,\u201d American Behavioral Scientist 56, no. 4 (2012): 379\u200a\u2014\u200a98.[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":1303,"featured_media":161327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[2414],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[2425,2424],"artistes":[2515],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-161446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-89-library","auteurs-olindo-caso-en","auteurs-zsofia-bene","artistes-blinken-osa-archivum-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1303"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274755,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161446\/revisions\/274755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=161446"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=161446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}