Jorge Méndez Blake
Guadalajara, México, 1974
Du fond d'un naufrage / Desde el fondo de un naufragio (From the Bottom of a Shipwreck), 2011
Bricks and book
161 x 120 x 106 cm
Edition 1/1
Acquired 2018

Trained as an architect, and with a long and strong affinity with literature, Jorge Méndez Blake has unfolded a complex body of drawings, sculpture, sound and installations that addresses the relationship between literature and architecture, often transposing concepts from one to the other. He has been particularly interested in libraries, not only as buildings, but also as recipients, managers and organizers of knowledge.

Du fond d’un naufrage (From the Bottom of a Shipwreck) is part of a body of work Méndez Blake has been working on in the past few years, which consist of brick walls, whose structures are affected by the inclusion of books of high literary value, such as Franz Kafka’s The Castle, or Amerika. Those walls could be read as a symbolic presence of the library. However, the way the books are placed also threatens the integrity of the architectural construct. In that sense, books – or knowledge – are means to disrupt an order of walls that divide territories and keep away people from culture.

The book found in this work is a compilation of poems and writings by the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.