The three-channel video Inbindable Volume (2010) takes the viewer through a journey around the brutalist space of an empty library interior. The three screens of the work communicate in a rhythmic and textural visual grammar, driven by the voice of an omnipresent narrator who describes the lifespan of a building from conception to abandonment through a text which skips unsettlingly between past, present and future tense.

The drive of the work juxtaposes the concrete and finished state of the building with perspectives which shift in time, simultaneously placing it in non-material states, as ideology or object of history. This juxtaposition is also present in the mass of books in the library, which embody the imagined spaces alluded to within them as they defy their physicality in a finale of eerily advancing bookcases. This draws a parallel, perhaps, to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, in which the author imagines an infinite number of hexagonal libraries containing books with every possible ordering of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks, a decidedly physical space contradicted by the sheer mass of information held within it.

Filmed in Birmingham's iconic Central Library, the city's most infamous example of Brutalist architecture, Inbindable Volume is an exploration of the journey between conception and materialisation, both in architecture and books, and what becomes of ideologies after they have been realised in material form.

Text from press release at Danielle Arnaud, London, September 201