Hell And Wonders
Venue: Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid
Permanent installation
Hell and Wonders is a journey through the pages of a great textual, visual and digital book, from the first alphabets and images to machines that write the future. In this place, the contents and collections of Spain's national library prove that the fascinating memory of culture, with its dark shadows and, above all, moments of brilliance, is more alive than ever.
The history of human creativity and knowledge is surveyed in four galleries: “Creation, Reading: Knowledge”, “Uniquely Human Hells”, “The Book of Wonders” (with the subsections “Marvelous Maps” and “The Expanded Book”) and “Memory Machines and the Future”. Quotations on the walls remind us of the millions of books that have been written, lest we forget that, without them and our reading, nothing of what we see makes sense.
