Installation: Plaza de España, Los Llanos de Ariadne
20 April – 4 May 2006

Every year, ‘Book Days’ take place all over Spain.

Stands are set up in public places where books are presented and sold, either by topic or in a colourful mix. This useful institution has been very well received despite the ever-increasing impact of the internet.

It was a great honour for me to be asked by the municipal authority to create an installation for this event, which was to be set up temporarily at the edge of the stalls on Plaza de España.

I quickly came up with the title and motif: Detrás de cada palabra hay más – ‘Behind every word there is more to be found.’

I felt the need to express the mysterious and non-obvious that lies behind the words. This cannot be experienced without effort and inner activity.

First, I did some sketches on form and colour and submitted the proposed installation that seemed most appropriate to me. The proposal was accepted: two triangular shapes were to be created – one smaller and one larger, with one edge concave and angled inwards.

The materials used were: weatherproof panels, burnt pages of books, tissue paper, acrylic paints and charcoal.

The pages of the book that were burnt on the sides served as a way for me to illustrate something of the process, so that words in their depth and truth may be repeatedly grasped anew by distancing oneself from one’s own ideas and interpretations.

This seemed most evident to me in the context of poetry, where soul and spiritual content often only reveals itself after considerable effort.

So I used poems by Jiménez, Pesoa, Lorca, Shakespeare and Goethe on the back.

On the small, inward-facing surfaces, I wrote the main motif in charcoal:

‘Detrás de cada palabra hay mas’ (‘Behind every word there is more to be found.’)

It stirred me over and over again at exhibitions in public spaces, to observe how ‘life’, human activity, develops around a picture.