Stedelijk Studies Issue #11

Reading as Sculpture: A new layer for the library in ruins

by Mariana Lanari

This text is an artist’s contribution situated in the intersection of performance art and information technology.^[1] It is a sequel to my project Moving Thinking — The origin of one’s thought is the thought of another, in which I implemented a visual presentation of information pathways and a model for the circulation of books between the stacks in the storage and the reading room of the Stedelijk Museum Library in 2015/16. It was a nine-month performance that aimed to reveal how the content of books is interlinked by transforming the current classification system in the reading room and replacing all the books on display with publications from the storage depot. I began by exploring the branching of the influential book Writing as Sculpture by Louwrien Wijers (1996). The book contains interviews between Wijers and important artists and scientists of the day, including Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, and Robert Filliou. Taking this title as a starting point, I composed several lengthy sequences of publications, distributed in relation to the floor plan of the museum and its current program. The permutations were recorded by photos and videos viewable on the website of the Stedelijk. This text tells what I learned from this research and how it informed Archival Consciousness, a collaboration with graphic designer Remco van Bladel that aims at interfering in the infrastructure of libraries in museums and cultural institutions by adding a layer of interaction on top of the existing database.

In a time of fake news, conspiracy theories, and alternative facts, it is increasingly relevant that artists, intellectuals, and designers claim responsibility in the creation of digital tools. As artist and scholar Johanna Drucker wrote in an article from 2009, “The design of digital tools for scholarship is an intellectual responsibility, not a technical task. Unless we [artists and] scholars are involved in designing the working environments of our digital future, we will find ourselves in a future that doesn’t work, without the methods and materials essential to our undertakings. We must be committed to designing the digital systems and tools for our future work. Nothing less than the way we understand knowledge and our tasks as scholars are at stake. Software and hardware only put into effect the models structured into their design.”^[2]

Fig. 15 Books from De Appel Archive, Archival Consciousness, 2021.

The Library in Ruins

The research is not precisely about the library; it is about the intricate relationship between the library, digital culture, and the internet. It is a critique on the way that artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are dominating the mediation of information and the means through which we have access to all sorts of content today, through digital platforms, from which we, as a society in the Global North, have practically no way out. The impact in the Global South is even more extreme in countries such as Brazil, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, where platforms such as Facebook and Google in certain regions are synonyms for the Internet and their algorithms are destroying legitimate channels of information by not only promoting but also financing disinformation.^[3]

In the midst of such a catastrophic scenario, and for the purpose of this research, the cultural library is seen as a laboratory for experimentation on all the processes that involve reading. That is to say, reading as an expanded concept—not about reading a book, but about what reading implies as a process of collecting, interpreting, and processing any kind of text, written or not.

In the library it is possible to draw parallels with information architecture through the observation of the whole information cycle, from the most basic element, the printed word, to the page, the book, the organization of the library, the reading room, the storage, the database system, the governance, and the architecture of the library. Together these elements give clues about how access to information is regulated, facilitated, or hindered.

Another interesting aspect of the library is that the technical infrastructure that serves it did not change much in the past twenty years. As Richard Wallis indicates in his article from June 2020 in Catalogue and Index from the Library and Information Association,

“The functionally offered by the vast majority of library discovery interfaces of today is little more than the web window into the catalogue that TalisWeb delivered in 1995, rather than being a route to the web for their rich authoritative data and links to the resources they describe.”^[4]

On one hand, this fact makes the collection of libraries difficult to access, but on the other, libraries are left intact by what Anna Tsing calls the algorithms of progress-as-expansion of the big platforms.^[5]

Fig. 11 Books from De Appel Archive, Archival Consciousness, 2021.

In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Tsing describes how the matsutake mushroom, a valuable edible in Japanese cuisine, emerges in the ruins of forests devastated by capitalist exploitation in Oregon, in the United States. The image of the forest in ruins is useful as a metaphor to reflect about cultural libraries, situated bodies of knowledges that are relevant for their communities but do not follow the logic of capitalism by having an expansive operational cost while offering their resources for free, thus not generating profit. They are seen in a similar way, in ruins of capitalist exploitation.

Since not all museums consider their library to be one of the core activities of the institution, the position of a library can be precarious and deserves special attention in a time where budgets in the cultural sector are constantly under pressure. In some cases, this has led to either leaving a museum library untended (Kröller-Müller Museum), a downsizing into a small documentation center (Kunstmuseum Den Haag), or even a complete disposal, which is the case of the Tropenmuseum.^[6]

The library in ruins evokes a generative potential and the conditions for the random apparition of new things from the networks of relations, collaborations, assemblages, and entanglements that, like mushrooms, are dormant underneath the surface of a library hidden in a cultural institution. The library is not only a place to find resources and provenance of information but can also be a place to test, observe, analyze, and demonstrate the features of social network algorithms, how they work and what they do, and examine—with the book collection as a case study—processes related to data processing and circulation of information.

Museum Library

Before continuing, it is worth clarifying that the current research is concerned with a specific type of library, museum libraries, and libraries in cultural institutes, that I will call cultural libraries, which are reference libraries; they are not lending libraries, meaning people are only permitted to consult books on location.

The museum library is part of a category referred to as special libraries, next to national libraries, public libraries, and academic libraries. National and public libraries preserve national cultural heritage and promote national cultural policy. In Toute la mémoire du monde, a documentary film by Alain Resnais, the National Library in Paris is portrayed as a state apparatus.^[7] It is a factory of knowledge, a machine operated by an army of people that collect, sort, preserve, and organize imprint. The documentary shows how “the idealized vision of rapid access to universal knowledge entails control, surveillance, and exclusion.”^[8] François I, the French king, instituted in 1537 the “depot legal,” the obligation of printers and publishers to deposit one copy of each book or pamphlet they published, not long after book production started to seriously increase. All these books became part of the royal library that formed the basis of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Other countries followed this example, thus not only creating an overview of the country’s book production but also a means of control and censorship.^[9]

The cultural library, unlike the national library or the academic library, does not represent national identity; it represents the views of specific groups. The cultural library does not seek completion beyond its field, nor does it aim for a total representation of knowledge. It is by definition partial and situated. It collects specific topics and areas of interests that reflect their program, intentions, desires, and bias. It also has a greater emphasis than larger academic libraries in collecting non-book materials, for instance, films, images, and clippings.

The library of the Stedelijk Museum is one of Amsterdam’s best-kept secrets. Few people know that when walking through the museum, they are walking on top of almost 200,000 books stored on three kilometers of shelves in one of the largest libraries of modern and contemporary art in Europe.^[10] Each object in the museum collection has its own stories and is part of a specific artistic context and period. This discursive aspect of the works is collected and stored in the library, where they are part of a vast network of relationships. Events and exhibitions last only a season; the library underneath remains. When the library collection is linked to and access is integrated with the museum’s archive, image archive, and the art collection, it will form an organic, living, dynamic memory of the museum’s activities through its history as well as the museum’s position.

Fig. 1. Catalogus bibliotheek. Photo: Fabian Landewee

On the occasion of the official opening of the library in 1956, librarian Louis Kloet and Willem Sandberg, director of the museum, compiled the book Catalogus bibliotheek, written in four languages (Dutch, English, German, and French) and describing a total of 16,000 catalogue numbers in an index by topic and in alphabetical order by author. This book constituted a snapshot of the library at the time.^[11] When Sandberg left the museum in 1963, the library had about 50,000 volumes. Since that date, the collection has grown to 200,000 items. In 2007, when the museum became an autonomous foundation (Stichting Stedelijk Museum), the library collection was secured by giving it the same legal status as the art collection, thus ensuring that it can never be discarded.^[12] From 1990, books were catalogued in a computer database, and from 2003 this database was combined with the collection database of the art objects. During the renovation of the museum from 2004 to 2012, all library collections and the whole art collection of the museum were digitized. The library catalogue has been accessible online since 2003, and part of Worldcat since 2016. When the archive of the museum from 1895 to 1980 was digitized, more than 400,000 documents became available online. The huge image archive of the Stedelijk (more than 150,000 images) is being digitized on demand.

In Sandberg’s time, the library shared the great room that is now the entrance to the old museum building with the restaurant. The reading room was separated from the restaurant by a glass wall and the books were stored on a gallery in a mezzanine. In this way, the books were on view for everyone, advertising the fact that the library was for the public. According to Michiel Nijhoff, current head of the library, the books stored there are still recognizable because they have been infused with cigarette smoke from the restaurant area. Since 2012, after the renovation of the museum, access to the library collection in the stacks is through the reading room, located in a basement floor directly underneath the bookshop. The large room is visible through a glass wall; there is a long communal table, and bookshelves fill the entire wall behind the table. These shelves fit around 5,000 books, corresponding to a small fraction (around 2.5%) of the collection. The remaining 97.5% of the collection is not accessible to the public. When a book is needed, the library staff will bring it from the stacks to the reading room. Computers in the reading room provide the visitor with access to the entire collection. The library’s database is an essential tool of mediation between the staff, the reader, and the holdings of the library. Without the database, it is impossible to locate objects, since the collection is organized by size as a way to optimize space. For the researcher who cannot visit the physical library, access to the database is through a search box in a web window. This is the case for most cultural libraries, in which entire collections are hidden behind a search box.

Fig. 2. Storage room of the Stedelijk Museum Library. Photo: Fabian Landewee

The Method: Performing Algorithm

The Stedelijk Museum library is an ideal library to experiment with emerging digital technologies and reflect on access, browsing, and discovery in cultural libraries. Being one of the largest art libraries in Europe, and with its focus on a particular field—modern and contemporary art—makes it a circular library; most books that are mentioned within other books are part of the collection. The acquisition of books is in large part realized by supporting research from curators or researchers for a particular exhibition or article. Because the museum also receives free copies of all books for which the library has served as a research laboratory or that contain images of works from the collection or of exhibitions from the Stedelijk, this focus is strengthened.

With all these elements in mind, I proposed in 2015 to curate a new selection for the reading room as a way to explore the entire collection of books; to read the library and to observe its infrastructure in detail. Although I had complete freedom to conduct the replacement of books, it was thanks to the generosity, insights, contributions, participation, and help of the staff that it was possible to carry out the plan. To remove 5,000 books, a collection of artists’ monographs arranged in alphabetical order, from the reading room to a temporary bookshelf in the storage so that the books would remain available and placed in the same order, was a very complex operation and a lot of physical work.

Fig. 3. Reading room of the Stedelijk Museum Library, Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Esther Brakenhoff

The method for selecting books, which determined the order in which they were transferred to the reading room, was to reproduce a computer system of hyperlinked texts by reenacting an algorithm, a sequence of moves in a specific order, following simple rules that could be repeated indefinitely. The first step was to empty the twelve central shelves and fill them with books having a link with one another. When the center shelves were complete, the remaining shelves were emptied and the books from the center shelves were then expanded to occupy the whole bookcase, creating areas that were in turn further populated. It was a kind of calculated explosion, one designed to distribute the books in a meaningful way, and the floor plan of the museum was projected onto the bookshelf. Each shelf was named after the corresponding museum gallery, and books were placed according to the artworks on display, be it the static regular collection or the temporary exhibitions. In this way it offered the public access to the primary sources and bibliographies mirroring the temporary exhibitions, as well as an overview of the museum’s past and present program.^[13] The exhibitions that were on display at the time gained a large share of the bookshelf. This was the case with Isa Genzken: Mach Dich Hübsch!,^[14] and later Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art.^[15] The setup exposed a network of connections between artists, authors, art historians, critics, editors, and curators, and elicited unexpected narratives. In addition, it enabled the reuse of the bibliography of the exhibitions on display. When the exhibitions opened, instead of being returned to the stacks, the books used in their preparation were placed on the shelf in the reading room, corresponding to the museum galleries where the exhibitions were displayed. Allowing the public to browse the bibliography of exhibitions was an exciting feature. The bookshelf became a maquette of the museum, an overview of the program, and a potentially permanent system for the circulation of books between the storage and the reading room. In this way the organic quality of the library was made visible.

Fig. 4. Reading room of the Stedelijk Museum Library, Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Fabian Landewee

The project was called Moving Thinking – The origin of one’s thought is the thought of another.^[16] The subtitle is a sentence from Georges Bataille’s The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge.^[17] Bataille, besides being a philosopher, novelist, and poet, also worked as a librarian and archivist at the French National Library. The phrase expresses the iterative mechanism of the development of ideas, a chain that could be made visible in libraries, where books refer to other books by means of intertextuality, quotations, and allusions. The Dutch library professor Theodoor Peter Loosjes defined documentation as “knowledge in motion,” referring to the ongoing process of research, publishing, new research, new publishing, and so on.^[18] Moving Thinking also illustrates that thought.

A library system following a similar type of arrangement was proposed by Aby Warburg, art historian and founder of the Library for Cultural Studies Warburg. In the early days of his library, books did not have a fixed position; they would move around the shelves according to changes in his research methods and interests, in a flexible system that could change at any moment. The library was seen as a research instrument, and shelves were arranged favoring browsing over fast finding and accessibility. Books could be hard to find, as it was not organized according to alphabetic order or call numbers, “but they remain a body of living thought,” something that according to him a national library would never provide.^[19]

Good Neighbor

Warburg is famous for the “law of the good neighbor,” an element that is central in his system. He noted that “often the book one needed most was not the one they were looking for but its ‘unknown neighbor’ in the bookshelf.”^[20] According to Fritz Saxl, “The idea was that the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbors—should guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history.”

Fig. 5. “Computers and their potential applications in museums,” conference sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, supported by a grant from the IBM Corporation, April 1968. Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Fabian Landewee

Apart from the personal system used by Warburg, various systematic ways of ordering books were developed over the century; best known are the Dewey, Library of Congress, and Universal Decimal Classification. All three are theoretical classifications with a practical goal to arrange the books on the shelves in a way that library users will find all books on a subject in the same area. At time of Warburg, around 1911, “in many libraries big and small, systematic arrangements were being thrown overboard, since the old categories no longer corresponded to the requirements of the new age…. The file cabinets of the systematic catalogue became the main guide to the students, access to the shelves and to the books themselves became very rare…. The book title in the file catalogue replaced in most cases that other and much more scholarly familiarity which is gained by browsing.”^[21]

Fig. 12. Books from De Appel Archive, Archival Consciousness, 2021

Collection as Data

Warburg’s law of the good neighbor has a digital counterpart in the method of linked data, based in simple statements in the same structure of a sentence composed by three elements, subject, predicate, and object, called a triple. By following a formal vocabulary and other protocols, statements stored in this fashion become readable by machines. Through the method of linking data from the content of books, Warburg’s system can be implemented digitally, beyond the shelf, in the form of a graph database with a semantic layer also known as a Knowledge Graph, without the need for a classification system.

The premise of Moving Thinking was to reenact the method of linking data in the physical library and to imagine the implications of implementing such a system. During the nine months, I worked somewhat like a robot, scanning books in search of mentions of other books in order to make a new selection for the reading room, without the intention of prescribing any meaning to the resulting relationships. My aim was to create a navigation system in which books are displayed next to each other by some sort of affinity. The collection was linked based on two rules: every book in the reading room had at least one link to a book in the depot, and each book had at least one known link to another book in the reading room. This transformed the selection in the reading room into a meaningful sample of the collection, turning any book into an entry point to the entire library.

Fig. 16. Books from De Appel Archive, Archival Consciousness, 2021.

The new selection departed from Writing as Sculpture, the book by artist Louwrien Wijers.^[22] The book is a collection of interviews and conversations that took place between 1978 and 1987, bringing together a group of artists, scientists, and spiritual leaders and resulting in a four-day seminar held at the Stedelijk Museum in 1990, entitled Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy.^[23] The first book mentioned in the introduction is Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, by Robert Filliou and a group of artists and thinkers, edited by Kasper König.^[24] On the next page is a picture of Joseph Beuys at Documenta 7 in 1978.^[25]

Fig 6. Writing as Sculpture, 1996.

Moving Thinking intended to create a social network of books, but the selection began to spontaneously reveal interesting narratives related to the museum. The curator of Documenta 7 in 1978 was Rudi Fuchs, who later became the director of the Stedelijk. In 2015, Isa Genzken’s exhibition was about to open at the Stedelijk Museum. Genzken had participated in Documenta 7. On her artist page in the catalogue was a picture of a room with the Ellipsoids, a series of long wooden sculptures distributed on the floor, and on the back wall the series of ear photographs. This was an exact reproduction of what was shown in the first room of the 2015 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum.

Fig 7. Image of Isa Genzken’s exhibition at Documenta 7. Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Fabian Landewee

Fig 8. Catalogue of Documenta 7. Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Fabian Landewee

Although this process of finding narratives through linking books started as a coincidence, what produces this effect is a feature of graphs called inference: when known relationships are declared, implicit relationships are revealed. And it became a method for reading the library. Since it is an institutional library, it tells the story of the institution and a history of art as it is perceived through the lens of the museum, therefore including its biases but also its internal contradictions, frictions, and dissident voices. For instance, the library reflects an exhibition history that is not always in accordance with the dominant narrative. The Stedelijk Museum has a liberal, Enlightenment-based colonial story, since the foundation of the building and the collection of the Stedelijk Museum was financed by wealthy Amsterdam entrepreneurs who often earned their money in business dealings with the colonies. The nine exhibitions organized by the social-democratic society Kunst aan het volk (Art to the People) between 1911 and 1927, the Russian avant-garde art exhibition from 1923, and the 1947 show by the revolutionary Indonesian brothers Agus and Otto Djaya, for instance, were not in accordance with a liberal political focus.

Fig. 9: Shelf dedicated to the monumental staircase of the museum, showing the cover of Museums by Artists, depicting Daniel Buren’s iconic vertical stripes. Moving Thinking, 2015. Photo: Fabian Landewee

Fig. 10: Staircase of the museum in 2015 with Kaleidoscope, a Work in Situ by Daniel Buren.

Bias in collections has become an important topic in the field of cultural heritage, especially when digital methods are applied, and research is being done to detect and investigate bias in museum collections.^[26] The library, interpreted as part of the museum’s memory, constitutes a specific social and transhistorical position from which the institution speaks and can be seen as a tool to investigate the museum’s position over time. It is a valuable resource for self-reflection, an organism that acts as a silent witness or as an active institutional voice. This resulting voice of the institution can constitute what Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro calls place-of-speech.^[27]Without understanding the power and limitations of the institution’s place-of-speech, the articulation of bias in a museum or museum library collection becomes generic, misplaced, or fabricated. Through this gesture of recognizing one’s position through mapping the different discourses, the library becomes an active body of knowledge in constant flux, rather than a static collection of objects, providing the institution with the tools to access its own memory and history, as well as the constant articulation and rearticulation of an institutional sociopolitical position, including its contradictions, ambiguities, and multiplicity of voices. Through this approach, every item counts as part of the collection; nothing is excluded, the order matters, what came first takes precedence over items that followed in a chain of events, and ancestral knowledge flows like a stream, as a form of intelligence that is anything but artificial.

In conclusion, would it be possible to implement such a browsing and circulation system in the library? From the paradigm of a current library system, the answer is no. When Moving Thinking ended, it felt like a failure; the thousands of books selected one by one returned to the stacks, links were broken, and the collection of monographies was placed back in the reading room. It did not leave a trace; it did not give any concrete result.

The bookshelf was always changing; while bibliographies were collected and displayed, they would soon dissolve into other collections. It was not possible to capture, collect, and display the paths through books in the physical library. Such a system would have to be supported digitally. It became clear that physical and digital library can complement each other; the digital system can enhance the use of the physical library and vice versa.

One of the downsides of Moving Thinking was that the relations between books were not visible to the public, especially not in the short period that it was on display. From the perspective of technology, it was the opposite; the project was a visual representation of what could be expressed in an ontology system and the Stedelijk Museum Library was provided with the perfect case study to continue pursuing the research.^[28]

While the technology that would allow for such a system is still complex and expensive, the main part of it relies on the preparation of data. The necessary actions for data preparation are embedded in the essence of the use of the library, in the act of selecting books and close reading. The process is slow, continuous, and never-ending. If there would be a means of aggregating data during the use of library resources in a non-intrusive way, the library would be increasingly more readable. The worldview expressed through such a system that is made with the input of readers would reflect a broader community of the library. The aspect of intelligence is not in the book, it is in the act of reading and making relations. Knowledge is transferred to the data through the relations. Relations can be stored, but the meaning of relationships is not captured, it remains open for interpretation.

During the period at the Stedelijk Library, I teamed up with medical doctor and computer scientist Mariana Casella dos Santos to recreate the same method of the circulation of books digitally. Using the concept of Moving Thinking, she developed OFAR Ontology for Artistic Research, an upper/mid-level ontology intended to support ontology development for artistic research. Utilizing OFAR as a framework, it would be possible to create an ontology specific to cultural libraries and their domain and gain a better insight into the essence of their collections. It started by defining the concepts and definitions required to represent and express the realm of cultural libraries. One of the first questions was: What is a book?

Moving Thinking considered the book from the perspective of the text. The current system of the library needs to handle the book as an object as well, by solving the complex problem of storage and retrieval. By defining the concepts present in the library ontologically, it was clear that a system that considers the library as data could not substitute the current library system—both systems need to be complementary.

My research continues through a practice-based PhD at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes and Emilie Sitzia, and ongoing art projects at the library of Casa do Povo in São Paulo and De Appel in Amsterdam. The technology to support the collection as data is becoming increasingly more available and affordable, thus the question is not only what it can do for a cultural library but also what we can learn from this existing technology, which permeates most of our digital interactions, by implementing it with the purpose of reading a library.

Fig. 13. Books from De Appel Archive, Archival Consciousness, 2021.

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About the Author

Mariana Lanari is an artist, researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam / Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She is co-founder of Archival Consciousness with Remco van Bladel, and part of the band Rainbowpeel 475.13. She is in the advisory board of De Appel Mobile Archive and of DAAP – Digital Archive of Artist Publishing (UK). She is a member of ARIAS, Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and Making Things Public at the lectoraat of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Her work has been shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Van Zijl Langhout Gallery, Arti Amititae, W139, Van Abbemuseum, Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), Casa do Povo (São Paulo), among others. Her work has received the support of Amsterdam Fonds vor Kunst, Mondriaan Fonds, Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie, Nationale Wetenschapsagenda NWA/NWO and Media Futures, European Union’s Horizon 2020.

[1] The text is based on conversations with Michiel Nijhoff, Head of Library and Collection Registration at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

[2] Johanna Drucker, “Blind Spots: Humanists must plan their digital future,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2009, accessed December 27, 2021.

[3] Karen Hao, “How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation,” MIT Technology Review (2021), accessed December 27, 2021.

[4] Richard Wallis, “Getting [library data] from there to here,” Catalogue & Index 199 (2020).

[5] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 28.

[6] The story of the Tropenmuseum library can be seen in the 2014 documentary Digitaal geheugenverlies (Digital amnesia), accessed December 27, 2021.

[7] Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956).

[8] Steven Ungar, “Scenes in a Library: Alain Resnais and Toute la mémoire du monde,” SubStance 41, no. 2 (2012): 58–78.

[9] See Le dépôt légal | BnF – Site institutionnel, accessed December 27, 2021.

[10] Comparable to the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre George Pompidou, the Tate Library, located in Tate Britain, or the library of the Reina Sofia Museum.

[11] Catalogus bibliotheek Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1957).

[12] Informed by Michiel Nijhoff, April 2021.

[13] This video shows a time lapse of the bookshelf, accessed December 27, 2021.

[14] Isa Genzken: Mach Dich Hübsch!, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2015), accessed December 27, 2021.

[15] Sara Martinetti and Leontine Coelewij, eds., Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual (Cologne: Walther König, 2016).

[16] Mariana Lanari, Moving Thinking – The origin of one’s thought is the thought of another, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2015/16), accessed December 27, 2021.

[17] Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

[18] Cf. T. P. Loosjes, Documentaire informative en haar rol binnen de wetenschap (Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1978).

[19] Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg Library, 1886–1944,” in Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, E. H. Gombrich (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970), 327–8.

[20] Mari Friman, Päivi Jansson, and Vesa Suominen, “Chaos or order? Aby Warburg’s library of cultural history and its classification,” KO Knowledge Organization 22, no. 1 (1995): 23–29.

[21] Saxl, “The History of Warburg Library.”

[22] Louwrien Wijers, Writing as Sculpture: 1978–1987 (Newbury, UK: Academy Editions Limited, 1996).

[23] Louwrien Wijers, Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy: From competition to compassion (1990), accessed December 27, 2021.

[24] Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (Cologne: König Verlag, 1970).

[25] Documenta 7, exh. cat. (Kassel: D + V Paul Dierich GmbH & Co KG, 1982).

[26] See SABIO – The Social Bias Observatory project, accessed December 27, 2021.

[27] Djamila Ribeiro, Lugar de fala (São Paulo: Pólen Produção Editorial LTDA, 2019).

[28] See “What are Ontologies?,” accessed December 27, 2021.

Mariana Lanari, ”Reading as Sculpture: A new layer for the library in ruins” Stedelijk Studies Journal 11 (2022). DOI: 10.54533/StedStud.vol011.art09. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.