(De wereld in beroering)
Old books hang in the air on fine threads, lit by bare bulbs, splayed open, pierced with screws . You lower your voice without deciding to. You move around them the way you would move around something wounded.
Simons takes a mid-century survey of Renaissance art, a book about how art first claimed its place in the world, and takes it apart in full view. Passages are blacked out. Whole sentences are cut into strips and left to fall, dragged down by threads of orange-red that pool on the floor in a tangled heap. On one blacked-out page, only a few words are left alive and they form a poem: the world, the world in turmoil, created through thought or word, as an intense touch, these become irrevocably bound.
The work speaks directly to a world in which books are banned, redacted and silenced. Here that violence is made visible and physical: the censor’s black bar, the severed line, the words spilled on the ground. But the piece refuses despair. Those red threads read as veins and as lifelines, and even scattered across the floor the words stay joined, one to the next. What survives the blacking-out still speaks. That is the quiet force of the work: it shows us the erasure, and then it shows us what cannot quite be erased.
