Biblioteca de artista: território em construção, a partir de Aby Warburg

Abstract

This research analyses the emergence of a significant number of works in the field of visual arts, from the late 1980s, related to libraries. The emergence of these works has been found to coincide with the resumption of interest in Aby Warburg’s work from the late 1980s, and the appearance of various studies around his KBW or Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliotek Warburg and the Atlas Mnemosyne or Bilderatlas. From this evidence, this research seeks to trace and understand possible relationships between KBW and artist’s libraries. This provisional denomination, artist’s library, considers the library as a space of poetic construction, describing the artist’s productions supported by the library space, whether it is a real or a fictional space. Thus, we poetically call these works artist’s libraries, presenting their different possibilities based on the work of various artists. We do not consider it crucial that the artists who produced artist’s libraries have necessarily had contact with Aby Warburg’s work. However, we believe that his work revealed another possibility to think about the library, as well as another way to think and do image research, also leading to the exploration of different relationships between words and images. Like Warburg, artists use the library as an arena, a field to think about, a territory in which they can build, intervene, or fictionalize a library.