ARTWORK > THE BOOK AND ITS WITNESSES / EL LIBRO Y SUS TESTIGOS

THE BOOK AND ITS WITNESSES
Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2025


Art is what makes life more interesting than art.
—Robert Filliou

With the daggers I
pilfered from an angel
I built my dwelling
—Edmond Jabès

•••

In 2014, I visited the Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa for the first time. While exploring its collection, I noticed that many of the books had been perforated by insects. That’s how they arrived: with tunnels made by larvae that had carved nests inside the pages while feeding on book matter. Since then, I’ve returned regularly to study these fascinating texts. They can no longer be read in a conventional way, but they offer a different kind of legibility.
Rather than seeing the Burgoa books as aberrations, we can think of them as evidence that all matter transforms. The traces left by insects don’t erase the books’ value—but they do change it. These tunnels open up new ways of reading and imagining how knowledge can be inhabited—ways no one anticipated.

Many believe that old books have lost their relevance in the digital age. But these insects seem to prove otherwise. Their tunnels link distant pages like physical hyperlinks. What seems outdated can, in fact, point to the future. It’s no coincidence that “wormholes” in physics are named after these very tunnels. Scientists borrowed the metaphor from old books to describe the possibility of connecting distant points in time and space. In their passage through the page, the larvae anticipated this concept.

The insects that arrived with the books at the Burgoa didn’t “destroy” the texts out of malice—they simply found a place to live. What is a metaphor to us was a literal shelter for them. As an artist, like the larvae, I work with the transformation of matter. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to understand these books as shared spaces. Looking closely at them reveals connections with other forms of life and sustenance.

The books at the Burgoa no longer contain insects, but the astonishing marks they left behind are part of the library’s history. These books don’t speak of ruin, but of a living force that found a dwelling within the written word.
—Dianna Frid, Oaxaca, May 2025

This exhibition is complemented by the show The Text and Its Substances, which was concurrently on view at the Biblioteca Henestrosa in Oaxaca at the time of this exhibit. Both art exhibits explore how text is transformed, erased, and rewritten through the material itself.

Dianna Frid acknowledges the significant support this project received from the Canada Council for the Arts.