Alicia Framis. Room of forbidden books

With her recent series of rooms - rooms for screaming, rooms for forgetting, protesting or developing dissident ideas - the Spanish artist Alicia Framis continues to question the present social and human environment, highlighting the devices causing alienation and other means of coercion. At the War and Peace National Pablo Picasso Musueum, Alicia Framis has created a room full of forbidden books : a library of books that have been censored, are or have been banned and whose authors have experienced or are still expericing difficulties with the legal or political powers that be. In the more extreme cases, some of these authors have experienced prison, torture and / or death. 

Open to visitors, this room of forbidden books is a place for study and reflection;  a place where everyone can asses the harms of censorships that were once applied to books that are now recognized as genuine masterpieces - many of which are part of of the world's cultural heritage. Thus from Nouveaux Contes by La Fontaine to Voltaire's Candide, from Lolita by Nabokov to The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, from the Bible to Mickey Mouse, it is clear that over the years and without distinction censorship has hit a great many books covering a wide range of topics. 

The full meaning of Alicia's Framis proposition comes to light in the chapel Picasso transformed into a homage to peace and in which, denouncing war, the artist created a painting full of warlike violence with horses tramling a book - the symbol of culture and freedom - under its hoofs.