Library dedicated to Claude Lévi-Strauss

This installation is the intersection between a conversation I had with David of the Waunana tribe in the Choko rainforest in Columbia, South America in 1986, and the critique that Lévi-Strauss expressed about writing’s civilizational importance in his seminal book ‘Tristes Tropiques’.

The time I spent with the Waunana on the banks of the San Juan river and my attempts to comprehend and understand their culture and the role of the shaman, brought me to the realisation that my questions appeared to determine the answers.

I realized how much the language I was communicating in was determining what I was perceiving, the extent to which what I saw, thought and understood was more a projection of my culture and ‘civilisation’ than what I was actually observing. The tools of investigation and enquiry determined the outcome.

Even more destabilising was the realisation that contrary to what I would have expected, David did not appear to feel threatened by the explanations I gave him when he asked me about the sun, the wind, and other natural phenomena. From his reactions I could tell he was quite amused by my scientific explanations, authoritative to me, yet somehow only a further elaboration to his cosmologie and not to the exclusion of his own belief system. As Levi Strauss stated ’instead of treating the whites as a foreign body, the Indians integrated them into their system of thought’ (1). As I explained the earth’s movement around the sun, the heating and cooling of the earth and the effect on the movement of air and the resulting wind, the sun began to set, David turned his head to observe this every day dramatic event and commented with a smile “it’s a funny thing science”.

In his famous book about his travels into the Brazilian interior during the thirties, Levi Strauss describes his skepticism about the importance we ascribe to writing as a civilisational instrument.

During his stay with the Nambikwara he observes the mimicking of his, Levis Strauss’, writing and noting by their chief who appears to want to heighten his authority in the eyes of his tribe through this appropriation.

Levi Strauss concludes: ’By accessing knowledge crammed into libraries, these people make themselves vulnerable to the lies that printed materials propagate in even greater proportion. The die is probably cast. But in my Nambikwara village, the strong heads were even the wisest. Those who disassociated themselves from their chief after he tried to play the civilisation card (after my visit he was abandoned by most of his people) were confusedly aware that writing and perfidy were entering their homes together’. (2)

The Bibliothèque for Claude Levi Strauss could be equally dedicated to the Nambikwara and to David of the Waunana. It consists of a fully mirrored wall reflecting half a feathered cabin to create the illusion of a whole cabin. The exterior is covered with black, lightly iridescent and yet light absorbing feathers. The incongruity of this natural material as an exterior architectural skin, both attractive and repulsive, houses and echoes the inversion of hierarchies on the inside of the cabin, playing with our habitual formula of nature versus culture.

The interior is panelled in American oak, with shelves of books that are ordered chromatically, each row of books slightly shifting to create colour gradations from green to yellow to orange to red to blue. The colour of the book’s spines takes complete precedence over title, subject and author to determine the order. Colour as a value, an order, though scientifically objective, can not be fixed or located ideologically or intellectually, yet stimulates us emotionally and triggers our deepest subjectivity. Furthermore this new order juxtaposes the titles in a seemingly random manner, subverting any notion of literary categorisation and thereby generating a new cultural reading. This library deconstructs or rather reconstructs our usual and binary representations of nature versus culture.

The mirror doubles the space, dramatises the chromatic effect and simultaneously limits it as an illusion, hinting at the vain authority we accord the verb and our subjective interpretation of our cosmologie, that of the so-called civilised world.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Foreword Chroniques d’une conquête dans Ethnies numero 14, 1993
Claude Lévis-Strauss, Les Nambikwara, Tristes Tropiques 1955, Plon