Path

Path, 2008
Discarded/Unwanted Books

Path is a site-specific, 250 foot-long outdoor installation at The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts that deals with the relationship between books that are somehow considered obsolete or unwanted and our own mortality as human beings. Evolving organically across the natural terrain of PCA, Path is an invitation to those who follow it to meditate on the narratives and knowledge contained within these books, the poetics of physical decay and our own fundamentally ecological aspect, and the threads of writing and burial that connect us all. All of the books used for this piece were "weeded" items from the collections of local libraries that had set them aside to be discarded or recycled.

In the Jewish, Muslim, and oftentimes Christian traditions, holy books are treated like physical bodies, so that they are buried instead of destroyed when their owners die or when they are no longer being used. Jorge Luis Borges often wrote about the physical quality of books and how their decay mimics that of the body, and the tenuous line they serve to connect us to who we are as humans: the discoveries of the past, the evolution of knowledge, the development of language, etc. Without books, where would we be? Yet, with the increasing digitization of knowledge, and the sheer scope of writing that exists, there are always books that become orphaned, obsolete, or unwanted. I am interested in dealing poetically with these books as objects that each once served the purpose of its own small compass of human thought, emotion, and meaning. Collectively, they become a pathway that evolves organically, implicitly asking “Where, indeed, are we going?” My hope is that visitors will follow this path of spines as an opportunity to engage with the environment and meditate upon the meaning of these physical objects, so full of narratives, history, and memory, that are now buried beneath their feet.

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