Reading Our Roots

Check out the amazing sculpture created by Swedish-Norweigian artist Susanna Hesselberg for the event Sculpture by the Sea 2015 in Aarhus, Denmark.

The work digs an inaccessible library, like a bottomless well, deep into the ground.

Its title: “When My Father Died It Was Like a Whole Library Had Burned Down.”

Seeing this piece brought a thousand things to mind:

— The mystical labyrinth in Jorge Luis Borges’ famed tale “The Library of Babel”

— How much I wish we could place glass around the base a giant tree so as to peer down into its hectic, gorgeous jungle of roots

— That the hours of deepest grief truly are illegible

— That roots — our roots, tree roots, roots of all kinds — carry stories within them

— How the artist literally returned our pages/our words to their beginnings

— How works of art, when drawn from a true place, spark us to see/feel/hear with new vision

— and on and on…

You?

 

Photos by Claire Voon for Hyperallergic