Amalia Pica: Lecturas Posibles

Amalia Pica's immersive, interactive installation transforms The Rotunda into a participatory library space where walls, furniture, and objects are rendered in chalkboard paint and hand-drawn outlines. About Everyone is invited into Amalia Pica's world. Emphasizing imagination, language, and play as fundamental tools for human connection, Pica constructs environments that encourage participants to redraw, rewrite, and recontextualize their surroundings. Lecturas Posibles takes the form of an almost two-dimensional library—an immersive, interactive installation in which every surface is transformed into a site of inscription and image. Walls, furniture, and familiar objects are rendered in chalkboard paint and traced with white, hand-drawn outlines, creating a flattened, graphic environment that oscillates between object and image, presence and representation. This exhibition was partially inspired by The Bass's bibliothecal history. The museum's building first opened as the Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center in the 1930s and was the first public exhibition space for art in South Florida. In 1962, a new library was built in Collins Park with The Rotunda as its gathering space. Then in 1964, The Bass museum opened through the donation of a private collection by John and Johanna Bass to the City of Miami Beach. The library was demolished in the 1980s, but the Rotunda was preserved because the circular structure is encased by a concrete bas-relief sculptural mural by Albert Vrana titled The Story of Man––which venerates the significance of writing and words throughout human existence. After learning this history, Pica reimagined this space as a communal "reading" room and site of shared authorship. Bookshelves, desks, and seating areas—populated by reclaimed and repurposed objects—evoke the familiar architecture of a library while seamlessly liberating it. Here, the fused-shut books function less as fixed repositories of knowledge than as catalysts for imagination, prompting the viewer with associations of educational systems, narrative construction, and the authority of the written word. Visitors are invited to activate the space by drawing, writing, and marking its surfaces with colored chalk, transforming the installation into a continuously evolving record of collective expression. Pica's practice, shaped in part by her early experience as a primary school teacher, frequently returns to pedagogical frameworks, both formal and informal, as sites where meaning is produced, negotiated, and contested. Chalk, chosen for its ephemerality, foregrounds the experience of participation over the permanence of its results. Marks accumulate, overlap, and are periodically erased, producing a cyclical rhythm of inscription and disappearance that resists fixed interpretation. This ongoing transformation reflects a broader relinquishing of authorial control: what begins as a pristine, monochromatic environment—at once precise and abstract—gradually gives way to the unpredictable, and often playful, contributions of its audience. By positioning the visitor as both reader and author, Lecturas Posibles proposes an expanded understanding of knowledge as something constructed through interaction rather than passive transmission. The installation becomes a space where narratives are not only encountered but actively produced—where the boundaries between learning, play, and social exchange collapse. Meaning emerges as provisional, collective, and in constant flux, authored not by a single voice but by the many who pass through and leave their mark. Read more Toggle Mixed media Installation