Lucia Onzain. 72/49. Seventeenth session of The book to come.

Throughout 2017, Mikel Eskauriaza, Karlos Martínez B., Gema Intxausti and myself were invited to make a production that would dialogue with what was discussed in the group reading sessions of ‘The book to come’. In the group we explored the concept of the book as something alive based on five books by Marcel Broodthaers conceived by the artist as autonomous works of art.

72 years separate Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) and Marcel Broodthaers’ Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1969). The writer Broodthaers, ‘abandons’ writing in order to work as an artist on the book of another writer, Mallarmé who extensively investigated the concept of the ‘book’ and the forms of reading in his search for the Total Work (or Book). Don Giovanni as an example of what is not enunciated but is there; El Burlador de Sevilla (around 1612, attributed to Tirso de Molina), where the typographer slipped the ‘s’ for the ‘d’ in a kind of ‘post-truth’ or alternative fact already in the 17th century.