Elsa Paricio. Biblioteca nacional

The installation Biblioteca nacional by artist Elsa Paricio is about reading spaces through the prism of time.

A container of Indian ink forgotten in a garden gave rise to this vast undertaking, which borrows its systematic and meticulous nature from the scientific method. The indelible marks left by the gradual evaporation of the liquid suggested to her that instead of asking ‘what is a place’, she needed to ask ‘when is a place’. Based on this initial observation, she decided to record the passage of time in different spaces using glass cylinders left at the mercy of the weather. Over a period of six years, with the help of numerous accomplices, she collected data from the four corners of the country, creating a kind of poetic cartography of the geographical expanse that is Spain. Inventoried and then displayed on shelves like archaeological objects, they form an archive or a library of the landscapes of a territory, a national library.