Álvaro Alejandro López de la Peña is a Mexican photographer and visual artist, based in Mexico City.

De Natura Libris is an ongoing project completed by texts by various authors who have generously collaborated with me, including: Salman Rushdie, Ana Blandiana, Orhan Pamuk, Joanna Kavenna, Ruth Padel, Lawrence Norfolk, Philip Gross, Paul Auster, Anne Carson, Forrest Gander, Anne Carson, Yann Martel, Alberto Manguel, Roger Chartier, Jacqueline Woodson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lidia Jorge, Enrique Vila Matas, Yan Lianke, among others.’

Roger Chartier, historian and historiographer provides this introduction:

What is a book? The question is not new. Kant asked it in 1798 in the ‘Doctrine of Right’ of his Metaphysics of Morals. His answer makes a distinction between the book as a material object, as ‘opus mecanicum’, which belongs to whoever has bought it, and the book as a discourse addressed to the public, whose owner is the author, and whose publication – in the sense of making public – refers to the ‘mandatum’ of the writer, that is to say to the explicit contract established between the author and their publisher, who acts as their representative, or agent. In this second sense, the book understood as a work transcends all its possible materialisations.

In the 17th century, it was often metaphorical language that allowed to think of the dual nature of the book. Thus, around 1680, a printer from Madrid, Alonso Víctor de Paredes, inverted the classical metaphor that described human bodies and faces as books. He sees the book as a human creation because, like man, it has a body and a soul: “I assimilate a book to the making of a man, which consists of rational anima, which Our Lord created with as many excellencies as His Divine Majesty wished to; and with the same omnipotence He formed the body gallant, beautiful, and gentle”. If the book can be compared to a human being, it is because God created his creature in the same way that a printer prints an edition.

“What is a book?” is also a question of the Moderns, often linked to another: “What is an author?” (Foucault?) or “What is literature” (Sartre). Borges answered the question in 1952: “A book is more than a verbal structure, or a series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it engages in with its reader and the intonation it imposes on his voice and the changing and enduring images it leaves in his memory. That dialogue is infinite; the words amica silentia lunae now mean the intimate, silent and shining moon, and in The Aeneid they meant the interlunium, the darkness that allowed the Greeks to enter the Trojan citadel… Literature is not exhaustible, for the simple reason that neither is a single book. The book is not an uncommunicated entity: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

De Natura Libris makes us hope that the book will not disappear, this “paper cube with leaves,” as Borges called it, which is still the object best suited to the habits and expectations of readers who engage in an intense and profound dialogue with the works that make them think or dream.

You can view more images from the project and find out about Álvaro Alejandro López’s work here.

This exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday 9am-5pm. No booking needed. The library is on the first floor of B block. Public parking on meters on main road or at Ashton Court.

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UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.