The Blank Screen

The first page of Species of Spaces by Georges Perec is an image, or a multitude of images, palpitating invisibly in between four black marks. It is an illustration of a poem by Lewis Carroll with a legend indicating that it is a map, a cartography. Like this map, the blank page and the cinema screen are also spaces containing an array of possibilities demarcated by the film frame or the margins of the paper. To Perec’s ‘species of spaces’ we have added a cinema as an extension of the museum space. A space that gains significance through a programme of films and works from the MACBA Collection presented by artists whose work is included in the exhibition.