Beyond the Library
The Serial Experiences of LAb[au]
“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts in the centre, surrounded by very low railings.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
In the speculative universe of Jorge Luis Borges, the library emerges as a figure of infinity, a totalising architecture that harbours all possible combinations of letters, books, knowledge, and abysses. It is from this tension between combinatorial logic and interpretative impasse that the practice of the Belgian collective LAb[au] seems to arise. Their work does not inscribe itself as a response but as a radical operation that seeks to reconstruct the very terms of the problem. By bringing their production into the context of the Biblioteca Brasiliana, the artists deliberately situate their investigations within the expanded field of language and memory, not to illustrate them, but to subject them to new systems of codification, transduction, and reading—often imperceptible, silent, or still to come. What is exposed here is not a formal response to the architecture of the library, but rather an infiltration of its own generative rules: time, rhythm, sign, code, noise, disappearance.
Founded in 1997 by Manuel Abendroth and Jérôme Decock, LAb[au]—an acronym for Laboratory for Architecture and Urbanism—operates as a conceptual organism that translates logical-mathematical structures into sensorial forms. This is not, as it might appear at first glance, programmatic art in the serial or traditional constructive sense, but a systematic and ironic deviation from the promises of modernism. In place of the optimistic rationalism that marked the geometric avant-gardes of the twentieth century, one encounters here a kind of poetic scepticism—a practice born from the collapse of systems, from the erosion of their own vocabulary, from the indifference of time in the face of the human expectation of meaning.
The works Rule 06: 25 random triangles (2016) and Rule 07: 25 random filling following the progression of the Fibonacci sequence (2016) exemplify, with clarity, their investigation into the translation of mathematical principles into plastic systems. In both cases, the very titles indicate the operative logic: a conceptual statement in the form of a “rule” that governs the generation of forms. In Rule 06, the rule determines the production of twenty-five random triangles organised across fifty-one framed pages, while in Rule 07, the Fibonacci sequence dictates the progression of fillings across sixteen framed pages. This transposition of abstract instructions into visual compositions recalls directly the tradition of constructivism and conceptual art, in which the work is born from the programme that precedes it.
Serialism emerges as a fundamental element, since each page is autonomous and at the same time part of a set governed by variation and repetition. The modular character permits different spatial configurations, rendering the dimensions of the installation variable and opening the work to multiple interpretative possibilities. Thus arises a productive tension between algorithmic rigidity—the immutable rule that governs the process—and the contingency of exhibition, in which each installation proposes its own cadence and perceptual rhythm.
Historically, these works resonate with the legacy of concrete and generative art, but refracted through a contemporary lens, marked by digital codification and computational logic as poetic material. In this sense, affinities can be traced to the experiments of Vera Molnár and Manfred Mohr, pioneers in the exploration of calculation and randomness in the visual field. The modularity of the pages also evokes the permutational systems of Sol LeWitt, in which visuality constitutes the translation of a conceptual statement, shifting the emphasis from individual expression to the execution of a principle.
From a perceptual standpoint, the serialism of the framed pages produces visual rhythms that function like a score, in which the spectator follows minimal variations and subtle internal displacements. What is offered to experience is not the representation of an object, but the visibility of a process, the sensorial incarnation of the rule. Contemplation thereby becomes an aesthetic experience of calculation, in which the gaze apprehends the coexistence of randomness and mathematical order.
This displacement of the human as the organising centre of visual language becomes even more evident in the collective’s kinetic and digital works. In Untitled (2020), an LED screen with twelve characters generated by software displays a sequence of unpredictable words, organised according to probabilistic logics and permutation algorithms. The work does not communicate in the classical sense of a coded message but rather saturates: each word appears as noise, as an excessive signal, as a background of a language that no longer addresses anyone. In these works, LAb[au] reveals not only the limitations of communicative devices but also their residual semantic potency: even what we do not understand insists on wanting to be read.
The collective’s textile works extend this inquiry into the domain of language inscribed in matter. In Origami Jacquards (2019), the industrial tradition of weaving is reactivated through generative software, which translates the Latin alphabet into binary codes to drive the punched cards of Jacquard machines—the forerunners of modern computers. The resulting tapestry is not merely an image or a decorative pattern but a form of tautological writing: a fabric that reads and folds itself, an utterance that is simultaneously cypher and surface. The allusion to the idea of a “tapestry-encyclopaedia” recalls Borges’s aspiration to total knowledge, yet empties it of content, exposing only the mechanics of artifice. The encyclopaedia here is mute—or rather, it can only be read if decoded by those who know its secret grammar. Language thus becomes a figure of the impossible—accessible only as a promise or spectre.
In the relief sculpture Origami Snubsquare (2018), composed of triangular elements arranged in rhythmic matrices, fractal logic is activated by servomotors and electronic controllers. The random motion of the pieces, though codified within predictable parameters, escapes repetition and introduces variation into the pattern. The work articulates itself as an unstable system, where what is at stake is not the objects as such, but their performativity—their capacity to update themselves at every instant as an unfinished organism.
Gathered within the Biblioteca Brasiliana, these works not only echo Borges but also push his allegory to its limits. If the Argentine writer’s library was a metaphor for a universe ordered by possible combinations, LAb[au]’s exhibition proposes another figure: that of an anti-universe in which order no longer matters and in which meaning disintegrates into self-generated codes. Here, cataloguing is impossible; there is only drift, mutation, and permutation—a space in which thinking, calculating, painting, and programming are indiscernible acts. Before this constellation, the Library ceases to be a repository of knowledge to become itself, as Borges envisioned, an organism of time, silence, and vertigo.
— Luiz Armando Bagolin