Living Library-Turning point literatures

curated by Massimo Melotti and Judith Wielander

Haessen Chung (South Korea), Charlie Jeffery (United Kingdom), Chiara Pirito (Italy), Benoît Roussel (Belgium), Gloria Safont-Tria (Spain), Rufus Willis (United Kingdom), Dafnà Moscati and Marco Mazzotti (Italy), together with Suwan Laimanee (Austria / Thailand), Armona Pistoletto (Italy) and progettozingonia (Italy) collaborated to produce an environment, a space where the book, viewed as a symbolic object, as a text, but also as the active process of reading is the fulcrum around which and in relation to which various forms of participatory activity take place.

Living Library is not just an exhibition, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. Rather it is an attempt to move beyond the very concept of the exhibition itself. It took shape in a spirit of ‘responsible social transformation’, which constitutes the principal guideline, the core element, the substratum of Cittadellarte’s work. It involved a very particular artistic practice, in that the artists and creative people working on the design of the project created individual works that became part of a single whole.

The result is a visual environment that people can walk around and socialize in, and which tends to become a globalizing work of art; at the same time the centrality of the book, in this case in the particular sense of a medium for change, assumes the specific features of a work of art.

by Massimo Melotti,

Art Critic and Communications Expert

for the Cultural Heritage