The deliberate destruction of libraries has historically been associated with the destructive power of fire. However, during the authoritarian purge of Social Democratic libraries in Austria in 1934, it was water that briefly took over. Parts of the “well-worn” workers’ library in Ebensee ended up in the waves. This triggered a cycle that silenced the books temporarily but also returned them, distorted, to the shore: as revenants, they stubbornly reclaim a place in collective memory.
The artist trio Ana de Almeida, Jakub Vrba, and Christian Wimplinger developed an installation-essay through a shared exchange of images, texts, and sounds—a discursive apparatus that communicates multidirectionally as a constellation of various artifacts. In the book-shaped resin sculptures created by the trio, archival documents, water plants, photographs, mud, sounds, and stones flow together, all remnants of the civil conflict that the memory of Lake Traunsee washes ashore and into the exhibition space. Here, they tell of inclusions and exclusions, of media transmissions, and the different states of time.
Ana de Almeida, Jakub Vrba, and Christian Wimplinger spent October in the exhibition space at the Ebensee landing, engaging with visitors and embedding new materials into resin books, allowing the library to grow continuously.
