Carlos Irijalba winner of the VII Ankaria Artist Book Award

The awarded piece consists of a reflection over a concept known as exaptation, coined by the South African paleontologist Elisabeth Vrba. Starting off with metallic foam as working material, conceived during the 60`s for human protheses purposes, the artist has created a book made up of 24 unique pieces, same number of ribs the human body has, elaborated with metal foam and accompanied with Elisabeth Vrba’s original text alongside various annotations from the artist printed over an unbreakable and waterproof rock paper. The books resemble in their form and appearance a traditional book, with a spine, a cover and embodies in its dialectic game between the obsolescence and the exaptation, but the interior lodges the latent diversity of other possible uses, like a mineral repository capable of new purposes.

The project supposes a reflection over the cognitive processes and their materialization and a speculative exercise of the tools that in the future will be used for the circulation, transmission, and storage of knowledge.

Carlos Irijalba’s trajectory as an artist has acquired the acknowledgment from prominent institutions such as Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, The Marcelino Botin Foundation, The Cambio Foundation or PhotoEspaña.

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