ETERNAL VERITY: Books on Street - Literature versus Traffic in Melbourne

Luzinterruptus is an anonymous artistic group, who carries out urban interventionsin public spaces. They use light as a raw material and the dark as our canvas.The two members of the team come from different disciplines: art and photography and have wanted to apply their creativity in a common action, to leave lights throughout the city so that other people put them out.They began to act on the streets of Madrid at the end of 2008 with had the simple idea of focusing people's attention by using light on problems that they found in the city and that seem to go unnoticed to the authorities and citizens.

In June, Luzinterruptus went to Melbourne to carry out a large-scale installation, their largest so far, at the Light in Winter festival. This year’s theme was “reading”, for this reason they asked to recreate Literature vs Traffic, a piece that they had previously installed in New York in a subversive manner and which they now offered the opportunity to expand it and make it grow for a month.

To the other side of the world they went, going from the sunny summer in Madrid to a mild and rainy winter, with the romantic intention of converting the modern and somewhat cold architecture of Federation Square, into a cozy, human and intimate space, which encouraged reading and tranquility.

They had 10,000 books discarded by public libraries because they considered them to be obsolete, that the Salvation Army was responsible for collecting and donating them to us, altruistically of course, they also had their lights and the help of a lot of friends with whom they lived for a month doing the work of assembly and installation.

The objective of this piece? The same as the first time that they carried it out, that a river of books overflowing into the physical pedestrian spaces and installed itself in the space allocated to cars, stealing precious space to the dense traffic in the area, in a symbolic gesture in which literature took control of the streets and became the conqueror of the public space, offering the citizens, a space (not as big as they would have liked) in which the traffic withdrew yielding ground to the modest power of the written word.

They managed, after a tough battle against the weather, to change the appearance of the plaza progressively for a month, and that on the night of June 30, a lane of the busy Flinders Street became a space for reading and coexistence, lit by a dim light that paled under the powerful LED displays installed in the plaza.

Their piece served as a backdrop for many things that happened there during these days. Of course, it was the scene for a multitude of photos taken by the curious and visitors, in addition it was accompanied by many other pieces installed during the festival of light, and to commemorate the el summer solstice it was used as the stage for the dance and performance piece Walking Through Words, directed byTony Yap and Yumi Umiumare in collaboration with various communities from the city.

On the final night, the overflowing river of books, was offered to the visitors who took their time choosing the most interesting to take home from the thousands installed there. In addition 9 artists from the company Yumi, conducted an impromptu and magical performance that ended in a donation of books to the occupants of the cars that were circulating in the vicinity, who, stupefied opened their windows to receive these mysterious presents.

Although it was a complicated installation, with a quite different approach to the modest and ephemeral ones that they usually carry out, the final balance was very positive, above all because of the people they met and that helped them to pull it off.

They want to give thanks for all help, to all the volunteers that generously donated their time to them, to the people from Fedsquare that smoothed out all the obstacles for us and that participated actively in the construction of the piece, to colleagues from Guerrilla Lighting that accompanied them with their flashlights, to Fred Kroh who gave them a large amount of photographic material, to the artists who embellished the installation with their performances… And special thanks to Alfonso Ruano who went with them from Spain and definitely without whom none of this would have been possible, thanks friend and of course, to dear Cristina Curiel.

Neither are they going to forget the time that they spent looking at books, flipping through their pages to discover the forgotten secrets of people who do not know, and wondering what the criterion was that the libraries followed to remove them from their shelves, some were truly impressive.