The Imaginary Library of Asuncion - La Biblioteca Imaginaria de Asunción
The starting point of this work is the discovery of a box filled with hundreds of photo- graphs belonging to Asunción Axela Lasarte, abandoned in a rubbish bin in La Barceloneta. During the pandemic, Cecilia Hurtado and Claire Ducène spent months talking about this woman, identifying with her and travelling, through her eyes, around the towns and cities of these pictures.
The story unfolds through the eyes of two artists imagining the chapters of Asuncion’s life, from her love affairs to her fantasised distant travels. A library collects these imaginary scenarios about an unknown woman.
The Imaginary Library of Asuncion - La Biblioteca Imaginaria de Asunción, Installation composed of a desk with the original archive of Asunción, print on Plexiglas. Library with plaster books, white books, accordion artist’s book, photographs, documents, love letters. Transfers on canvas and print on paper, 2023.
Design/realisation of the library by Endless House Collective (Claire Ducène & Nicolas Riquette)
Cecilia Hurtado (born 1973, MX, lives and work in Guadalajara) is a visual artist and photographer. Her work is based on strategies of appropriation of images, whether from vernacular media archives (ordinary, with no artistic intent) or institutional archives, and on visual experimentation as a creative process.
Claire Ducène (born 1986, BE, lives and works in Brussels) is a multidisciplinary artist fascinated by memories and the passage of time. Her site-specific installation work is a plastic reflection on memory, which is constantly transformed by our emotions, on that which remains and on various forms of forgetting.