ROOT

Winter is a still, cold season in which the earth seems to stop and go silent, far from the vibrant burst of summer. Roots remind us of what remains underground and ties the apparent stillness to the essence of life and the bowels of the earth. In the course Branch, Root, Sprout, Stem, developed within the Schools of Context at the La Capella Art Center, we adopted reading as the activity for this winter, root-like season, and declared that reading is inseparable from any form of writing. In these work sessions we have sought shelter and warmth with fire, we have shared reading recommendations appropriate to the season, and we have analyzed artistic and curatorial works that have led us to books and the read word. The images of ice and the polar conquests of Alicia Kopf; the work made from flowers and roots in the cemeteries of Jerónimo Hagerman and nyamnyam; the weeds on the margins of graves collected by Àngels Ribé and transformed into large bouquets of flowers; the underlined sentences in all the copies of Virginia Wolf’s book A Room of One’s Own in the public libraries of Sweden, collected by Kajhsa Dahlberg; the golden dung hill that Perejaume kept outdoors; the snow-covered flowers in a botanical garden that Mariona Moncunill photographed, and the possibility, according to Moncunill, that books can be windows between unknown people separated by thousands of miles if they read them aloud at the same time. These were some of the artistic works that we studied together and that we kept in mind when preparing a selection of bibliographical references related, directly or indirectly, to images of roots and winter. They are a sketch of a winter library traversed by the links between life and death, cold and shelter, imperceptible transformations, isolation, silence, cabins and snow.