Impressions of a Paper Monument to Free Speech

To be moved by a work of art is an exciting feeling. Antje Brauer-Maxaeia had such an experience recently when she visited the documenta 14, one of Europe’s largest contemporary art exhibitions that has been turning the German city of Kassel into a giant living gallery every five years since its inception in 1955.

A giant art work created of books would naturally catch the eye of anyone with an interest in information provision and libraries.

Made not of bricks or marble but of up to 100,000 banned books (donated by the public), plastic and steel, the life-size replica of the Parthenon, Greek symbol of democracy, by the Argentinian conceptual artist Marta Minujin highlights the age-old issue of censorship and freedom of speech. While the idea was originally conceived by the artist at the end of military rule in Argentina in 1983, its continued relevance is striking at a time when journalists and writers are still regularly persecuted and academic publishers are pressurised into considering self-censorship by powerful regimes as in the recent case of Cambridge University Press and China. The location of this documenta centre-piece on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz where the Nazis burned books they deemed subversive in 1933 is also a poignant reminder of what can happen if censorship is left unchallenged.

The project is a truly collaborative effort that included local university students drawing up a list of books that are currently or were once banned somewhere in the world, and book donations still coming in from the public to fill the remaining empty columns.

This is an artwork that invites you to linger (as I did, much to the frustration of my family) and you will always find new unexpected titles such as the seemingly innocent The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter or Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery alongside more predictable ones like George Orwell’s 1984, the ‘Harry Potter’ series and the Bible. It highlights the fact that books are banned for a wide variety of reasons.

As a member of the UCL SSEES Library team, my eye was naturally caught by the many East European and Russian authors displayed who either had at some point, or still have, some or their entire works banned by the authorities in their countries. The SSEES Library houses an exhaustive collection of writings on the topic of the media and censorship in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The reactions of other visitors which ranged from disbelief to dismissive and emotional indicate that this art work strikes a resonant chord. On a personal level, it provided us with plenty of food for thought for educational family discussions on holiday.