The materials of the imagination

The publication of La piedra blanda (Random House), by Rodrigo Cortés and Tomás Hijo, is an event because it exemplarily demonstrates that narratives aren't just made of stories and ideas: they're also shaped by materials. During the reading experience of this strange comic about the miraculous life of Pedro de Poco in a hallucinated Middle Ages, in which the panels, rather than fitting together like a Tetris game as in typical architecture, float across the white of the page, you feel the thickness of the page with your fingers and sense with your eyes another thickness, that of the black and white drawing. Because each of these panels has been sculpted with two gouges, one one millimeter thick and the other five; before printing, it was an engraving.

In Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Caja Negra), biotechnology researcher Laura Tripaldi emphasizes this central aspect of complex materials: “Their structure can contain a certain amount of information that doesn't come from the outside, but is written in the relationships between the microscopic elements that compose it.” This can be extrapolated to the composition of a work of art, as this is also constructed through the “cooperative and relational” nature of its elements, “which is expressed in a broad, decentralized structure and gives the material properties that its individual parts don't possess.”

Books are made of stories, ideas and materials and we, readers, are bodies and minds.

This is how the text and drawing operate, hand-engraved and arranged with great originality inside La piedra blanda . Or the comic, drawn and embroidered, El cuerpo de Cristo (Astiberri), by Bea Lema. Or the literary and graphic essays by Frédéric Pajak, in the volumes of his Manifiesto incierto (Errata Naturae). Among other masterful examples of hybridization of text and image with an emphasis on their materiality. The reissue of La casa de hojas (Duomo), by Mark Danielewski (translated by Javier Calvo and laid out by Robert Juan-Cantavella), reminds us that 21st-century literature was restarted with that designed novel, in which typography, calligram, and collage mean as much as the story of the supernatural house or that of the cursed book.

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But the materials of fiction and documentary are not always visual or physical; sometimes they are codes or textures. Danielewski uses cinematic language or footnotes to inform his novel; Pajak, philosophy; Lema, autobiography and confession; Cortés e Hijo, hagiography and legend. Books—like films or podcasts or exhibitions or performances—are made of stories, ideas, and materials. Like us, their readers, bodies and minds that should not seek simplifications, but rather possible reflections of their own complexity.