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Artist Guy Laramée has created an impressive sculpture titled “Adieu” to pay homage to the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, by transforming a 24-volume set into a sloping mountainous landscape.
Using similar techniques applied to previous sculptures, such as The Great Wall and Guan Yin, the artist created an entire mountain range inspired by his travels to South America. The majestic landscape was created by carving, slicing, gluing, stacking and collaging the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and meticulously detailed to represent the lifelike texture and topography of exotic landscapes.
Symbolically entitled ‘Adieu’, the sculpture is an homage to the long tradition of printing the world’s most famous general knowledge encyclopedia. After more than two centuries, the once coveted print edition of the encyclopedia came to account for a small percentage of Britannica’s revenue and the company decided to stop the presses and focus on its online presence.
” The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?
When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination. – Guy Laramée
via guylaramee.com