Artist Miguel Angel Blanco has developed a collection of wooden boxes as a forest library, containing the findings from intentionally symbolic walks. These collections are his journals imprinted with journeys taken from the past thirty years. The Biblioteca del Bosque (Library of the Forest) is housed in the basement of his home in Madrid. Miguel’s walks are primarily taken within the Guadarrama Mountains outside of Madrid. The library as a whole is an evolving sculpture; it is also an ecology of life, documenting Miguel’s communications with nature.

Artist statement: “Art is experience. The simple action of walking about the forest’s paths opens the eyes to the essential, increases receptivity and tunes the senses. The walker is on the watch, on a constant alert, trying to see in the landscape more than the usual, expanding reality. The forest creates an inner state of serenity, pureness and optimism. The idea of a book being a collection of objects that are ideas, moments of time, landscape, and movements held within a box vessel, can be a vital medium of artistic practice within art therapy.

A walk can be taken alone on accompanied by others within an art therapy journey that involves the surrounding habitat within a rite of discovery. The words of thought and feeling held within the significance of objects selected, illustrate and enact a psychological quest. This is a language of wandering and finding significance in what is close at hand. The book is an installation that can be handled and read in many ways. Time is contained within the dimensions of the book’s architecture. The composition of the book, reveals itself as a structural building, a home place for an ephemeral story.“

His library comprises more than a thousand wooden “book-boxes” each of which is a reliquary or cabinet containing the objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beech, elm. Each of these micro-terrains represents a completed journey; but the library itself – ever growing – is a compound pilgrimage without visible end.

Resources and to read more:
http://www.bibliotecadelbosque.net/la-biblioteca-del-bosque/
https://territoriesofarttherapy.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/miguel-angel-blanco-library-of-the-forest/
http://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2015/04/the-library-of-the-forest.html
http://some-landscapes.blogspot.com/2012/06/the-library-of-forest.html