Claire Pollet
Réserve - Installation - 2010
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 12
Installation
Since September, I have spent a large part of my time reading books and making notes on them. A few tools have been my companions, a pencil, bits of paper… Through this research, I try to understand, highlight what I am doing. During the exhibition, the books are frozen in a block of transparent ice. The notes are physically lost. They escape from public view. The reading stops and gives way to a new object. The exhibition is finally this time when the artist draws back and delivers his piece to new interpretations. Here, "Reserve" presents its own genesis and its own ending. A paradox, since if the cold can be a tool of conservation (in Prague, since the floods of 2002, around 150 000 items from libraries are today waiting to be restored in refrigerated warehouses), here it is presented as a tool of destruction. I don't know in what state the books will be found once delivered. Alongside the exhibition, an Internet site presents the annotated pages. Each has been scanned; the site is a lacuna memory of this time of reading, the portrait of a reader. Paths have been prepared suggesting a return to the intimate space of reading. This piece is, by definition, unfinished. I continue to read books, I am still researching. And I imagine that "reserve" could continue with books never ceasing to disappear in future exhibitions. www.reserve2010.com
