Books are a highly familiar element for Alicia Martín. She says that her parents' home was filled with them. So rather than books being seen as a found object, they can be thought of as having chosen her, and to have done so in an entirely intuitive manner. Madrid-born Martín has dedicated her career since the early 1990s to using book-objects (containers of knowledge) as raw material in her works. Her output ranges from specific interventions in interior and exterior spaces to drawing, photography, sculpture and animation, referencing transcendence and the passing on of culture in spite of the fragility of the support.  Her works are both recognisable and non-repetitive. She is fascinated by the universal nature of books and their anthropological and ergonomic essence. She is quoted as saying that 'anyone of any age from any culture and in any language knows exactly what a book is when they see one'. She admires the storage capacity of books, their versatility and their suitability for discussing the evolution of humankind to the extent that they reflect her personal and social concerns.

This diptych was made in 2000, the same year when she produced a photographic suite entitled Contemporaneous. Together with an imposing installation at the now-defunct Oliva Arauna Gallery in Madrid, it shows books that occupy a space where all their contents coexist at the same time, invading the space reserved for viewers, pushing against and demolishing some walls and placing stress on another that is in imminent danger of collapsing. This startlingly dynamic photo diptych was produced by gathering together books that fall or collapse incessantly. It could well be a reference to the vital need to free up space so that it can be occupied by knowledge that never rests, or to the state of permanent watchfulness that results from the lack of a conclusion when time is shown as "paralysed". It is also a subtle way of referring to the process of sculpture from the viewpoint of its conceptual nature, and of calling into question the idea that there is a single form of archiving, given the speed at which the meanings to be archived evolve.

Frederic Montornés