not on top I (2014)

For this work I borrowed all books which had a ”pourquoi” in their title from the public libraries in Charleroi. I made a list of those titles, in which I sorted them in the order of the year they were published. The oldest publication dated from 1901 (“Pourquoi la Belgique doit etre en état de se défendre”), the latest were from 2012 (e.g “Pourquoi un enfant de 5 ans n´aurait pas pu faire cela”).
This list was conceived assuming that a certain kind of shift in the way of questioning (in the field of History, Philosophy, Science…) would become visible in the timeline. Nonetheless, this could not really be proved, partially maybe because I had only 120 collected books. In fact, I was facing a rather “wild mixture” which showed a rather absurd combination of “pourquoi-questions”; the gravity of some of them were put in perspective while reading them all in one row and through their accumulation.
This more or less banalized heap of books became installed in a parked SUV, a Land Rover, and so exhibited in public space.