Surges

Historically, the targeted destruction of libraries is usually associated with the destructive power of fire. However, in the case of the state-run purge of social democratic libraries in Austria in 1934, water took over for a short time. Parts of the “heavily read” workers’ library ended up in the floods in Ebensee. This set a cycle in motion that temporarily silenced the books, but also washed them back to shore in a deformed state: As revenants, they stubbornly assert their place in the collective memory.
The artist trio Ana de Almeida, Jakub Vrba and Christian Wimplinger develop an installation essay in a joint exchange of images, texts and sounds – a discursive apparatus that communicates as a constellation of different artifacts in a multidirectional way. Archive documents and aquatic plants, photographs and mud, sounds and stones flow into each other in the trio’s book-shaped resin sculptures, all debris from the civil war, which the Traunsee memory washes back onto land and through the exhibition space. Ana de Almeida, Jakub Vrba and Christian Wimplinger will spend the month of October in the exhibition space at Landungsplatz Ebensee, engaging in conversation with visitors and sinking further material into new resin books so that the library continues to grow.