Florence Jung : Nadie Nada Nunca

Don Quixote is a gentleman who one day decided to become an heroic knight in Spain. Florence Jung takes on the quest to make Don Quixote disappear from Costa Rica: buying all the copies in all the bookstores, borrowing all the copies from all the libraries and offering to buy people’s personal copies. This singular one-book library is now hidden in a secret place in San José.

Collecting all existing copies of the book is both a way of breaking the colonial phantom of the language and its origin, Spain, and a way of constituting a singular library, where one can only read that text. Then another book is produced, one that does not actually refer to the classic text but to the covers of its different editions.

The covers are text, a continuous exercise in interpreting the figure of Don Quixote and Sancho. Flipping through them, they aim to activate the imagination regarding the text, its cultural status, its philosophy, and its relationship to the practice of art today. The sum of the library and the book of covers prefigure a kind of artistic research concerned with the transcendental conditions of knowledge, that is, with the a priori that make possible empirical knowledge in general and artistic knowledge in particular. What is still knowable? How can the relations between ideas and things, ideas and ideas, things and things, things and beings, beings and ideas, beings and creatures be challenged? Speculation is a possible method.