El llibret de falla. Una oportunitat cultural

The Ancient Library of Alexandria was, in its time, the largest in the world. It is estimated that it was founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC. C. It was born under the ambitious idea of ​​founding a city that contained universal knowledge, welcoming all cultures and beliefs. In this way, he intended to collect all the works of human ingenuity, which had to be included in a kind of immortal anthology for posterity. Its tragic end, the result of the flames and numerous disasters, meant that only a few parchments are preserved, sheltered in the shelters of ordinary people, who took care to protect them from the persecution of the authorities and the conquerors.

By centralizing culture in one place, what happens in it remains, the acquired knowledge. The time in front of the book. But neither is the library necessarily a delimited storehouse of books, nor is fire inevitably a destructive phenomenon. The library can be an entire city, just as fire can be an excuse to build.

In Valencia, fire brings us together around the ephemeral construction of new things; of the unusual and the surprising. We build the fallas, an ephemeral museum that forces us and requires us to go out into the street, turning the impossible into the everyday. We decentralize knowledge, we extend it to each neighborhood, to each corner. And we edit publications around our sculptures, which after the flames have passed tell us about our own history, the one that is recorded in the llibrets de falla: our library on a city scale.

Well, also as in that old legend of Alexandria, ordinary people keep our manuscripts on the shelves of our homes, protected from the fire that made us build them. Each copy, of each falla, in each home: on a shelf or in a drawer, new or broken, read or to be read... Like a great library that extends to all the regions.

The main objective of this project is to make known this rich heritage that lies hidden from other Fallas creations, but of undeniable cultural and linguistic value. For this reason, we wanted to collect from all those houses and drawers scattered around the city, from different casales and llibrets kept by different people, to make a temporary and mobile library treating each llibret de falla as a jewel, with its own study space. . Each of these spaces is an intimate corner, to discover that mix of reflections and also memories of the collective imagination in different historical periods. Finally, we have understood the llibret de falla as a genuinely local literary genre: a space for free expression that accommodates poets, writers, illustrators, photographers... and that, above all, is born directly from neighborhood associations and, therefore, Therefore, it is really rooted in our territory. However, it should be noted that in this small library there is a totally subjective selection of llibrets, but that explains a bit of what Valencian men and women have been doing and are doing working together.

Coordination from the museum
Sandra Moros

Wood work
Raúl Garbayo

Photography
IVAM, Sergio Santoro, Nerea Coll, Ricardo Ruíz

The project includes the curating of the pieces that are part of this temporary library, as well as the design of the architectural space that makes up the chronological and modular piece of furniture that functionally resolves the exhibition concept, capable of adapting to different forms, in relation to the space where is located, which in the first place is the IVAM lobby.

The project graphics and the explanatory brochure have also been designed, which includes the library plans and the list of the archive of selected books and objects.

The curatorship includes the digitization, registration and archiving of the material that has been part of the investigation, which has been classified and summarized. In the library all llibrets could be consulted.

For the opening of the library to the public, a round table was organized in the museum's auditorium, with the intervention of professionals who work on the llibret de falla from different perspectives.

To develop the project, different working documents were also prepared: hand-drawn sketches of the first ideas, rendered images, technical and construction plans, etc.