This year UNESCO chose Buenos Aires as the World Book Capital and to celebrate Argentinian artist Marta Minujín created an 82-foot-tall spiraling tower draped with 30,000 books in dozens of languages. It took volunteers 10 full days to build the structure out of materials donated by readers, libraries and more than 50 embassies. The tower stood in Buenos Aires from May 7 to May 28, 2011 and when the installation was over some of the lucky visitors were allowed to take one book each home with them, the rest will form the basis for a new book archive called Library of Babel.
"A hundred years from now, people will say 'there was a Tower of Babel in Argentina ... and it didn't need translation because art needs no translation.'" said Minujin.
For the full article and more pictures of this incredible project visit the 1800Recycling website
here.
Wow! I would love to see it in person. I wonder why they chose Buenos Aires?
ReplyDeleteI briefly looked online and although wasn't able to find anything concrete here's some info from the official site and Wikipedia:
ReplyDeletehttp://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=24019&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Capital