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La Bibliothèque, La Nuit
- Phil Segall
- Sep 12, 2016
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 3, 2021
One standout highlight of my time in Canada (as well as Cycling for Libraries, of course!) was an exhibition entitled La Bibliothèque, La Nuit (The Library at Night) at the Grande Bibliothèque (BAnQ), Montréal. I felt it was so unlike anything I'd encountered before that it surely warranted its own blogpost...so here goes!:
The exhibition is a collaboration between Alberto Manguel and Robert Lepage. Manguel wrote the book La Bibliothèque, la Nuit a full decade ago and this was an effort to bring this vivid reflection on libraries to life. Lepage is a celebrated Canadian actor, playwright and general thesp who decided to bring this bang up-to-date through use of Virtual Reality (VR).
In his book Manguel ponders why people create libraries, how they are used and they remain relevant in a digital age. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted with a recreation of Manguel's own impressive library:
Manguel's library replicated at the exhibition - his real library is housed in a 15th-century barn in the Loire
During this immersive introduction, the library is plunged into darkness whilst the books are illuminated. A narration from Manguel explains how libraries come alive at night, when readers' imaginations are at their most open and inventive. *
*Or this is how I understood it anyhow - my understanding of French is not the best, I admit!
A set of shelves then revolves to reveal a secret entranceway (...you'd expect nothing less, right?!) into a 'reading room' like no other!...
...okay it's a bit hard to see due to my shoddy photography but the tables are interspersed with trees. Pages from classic texts (i.e. book 'leaves') are scattered around. 1920s-style desk lamps illuminate the headsets which we were then invited to put on:
A VR headset - visitors rotate on swivel chairs at the desks to explore 360° virtual environments
This was my first experience of using a virtual reality headset since the early-1990s, when I put on a Nintendo Power Glove at some sort of GamesMaster-related convention and groped at uninspiring polygons...
VR has come a long way since this REND386 version failed to
set the world alight in the early 1990s!
Image: Sean Clark (2014)
This, though, was a whole different VR! The immersive environments made for an unnerving experience at times, to the extent that it is very weird not to be able to see your own body when you look downwards!
The environments themselves were 10 legendary libraries...and not just the ones you might expect either! Yes, some of the stalwarts of many a "most beautiful libraries..." list were there - Trinity College, Dublin makes it in, as does Admont Abbey in Austria, the Library of Congress and the Jose Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City. But interspersed among these were fully animated, 360° renderings of the imagined original Library of Alexandria, as well as the library Jules Verne envisioned onboard The Nautilus (captained by Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea).
The libraries come to life in extraordinary ways, too; whilst exploring the Library of the Canadian Parliament, the book often cited as the world's most expensive - Birds of America - is brought to live as some of the colourful specimens featured in the tome take flight around the building's immense reading room. In a particularly poignant (and sadly topical) scene, you stand within the former National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo as a lone cellist plays at the grand foyer's staircase whilst tanks storm he building from outside. You watch as the building is engulfed in flames and crumbles around you - flames from the library's reading rooms licking at doors and windows until these eventually give way. As the scene fades to black, it is explained the cellist is based upon a real musician named Vedran Smailović, who would resolutely continue to play in Sarajevo during the 1992-1996 siege. It is truly an emotive moment in the exhibition and one which I do not think could be conveyed quite so movingly in any other way.
The full list of featured libraries is included in this article from CBC News and you can also spot some of these in the full trailer for the exhibition here:
If you want to see it for yourself in person, well...you can't - at least at the moment - as it has now closed, unfortunately! There are plans for it to go on tour, however - so fingers-crossed it will be coming to a town near you soon!!**
**Update: La Bibliothèque, La Nuit has moved to Musée de la civilisation in Montreal until April 2017.
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