Book Night
INSTANTeTERNO
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on 30 September. A maximum of 1 per person. Punctuality is required given that entry will not be allowed once the activity is under way.
5pm, 6pm and 7 pm
Scala’s new work has been conceived on just one sheet of laid paper, offset printed and 1500 metres in length, its unfolding bearing the concept of time. It is part of a group of works he identifies as continuous, cylindrical peoms, in which the materiality, spiritualty and rituality from 500,000 or more sacred papyruses safeguarded in the Library of Alexandria is revived. The poem conjugates writing with intangible aspects such as the rhythm, trance and incantation generated by geometric repetition.
This new poem-landscape is dedicated to the memory of Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905–1936), the author of 5 Metros de poemas (5 Metres of Poems, Lima, Minerva, 1927) and who, in 1936, confronted his hopeless illness in Madrid’s General Hospital, the site of the Museo Reina Sofía today. Just a few months later he would die of tuberculosis at the age of thirty in the Royal Sanatorium of Guadarrama, in Navacerrada.
The activity starts with a brief introduction by the artist on the process of conceiving and producing his new work, leading on to a meditative reading, also led by Scala, in which participants can roam the poem in silence to perceive the transience-eternity of existence.
Eduardo Scala (Madrid, 1945) is one of the main points of reference in experimental poetry — spiriential, as he terms it — in Spain. His books, most notably SOLUNA (1977), CIELOLEUS (Madrid City Council, 2006) and VISUALBREV (La Oficina Ediciones, 2011), form a constellation of new poetic models, the manifestation of a language project of totality.
