Spanish Pavilion, Bogotá International Book Fair (FILBo) 2025
The Spanish Pavilion at FILBo 2025 is conceived as a series of landscapes connected by the movement of mobile libraries. Common in rural areas, these institutions constitute essential infrastructure for universal access to knowledge. Modest in scale and materially austere, they operate outside the logic of economic profit, linking readers in peripheral communities through their circulation. Historically, mobile libraries have played a vital role in both Colombia and Spain, providing access to books for broad segments of the population and often serving as a first point of contact with reading.
The Pavilion understands the mobile library as a form of architecture that links two kinds of knowledge: the written word, inscribed on the pages of books, and orally transmitted craft knowledge, embodied in materials such as handmade felt, macrame, netting, or fique. This dual condition resonates with universal semantic connections between words like text, textile, and tale—coincidences that appear in Latin (textum) as well as in Amerindian languages spoken in Colombia, like Wayúu (süchi).
The visit to the Pavilion unfolds as a sequence of welcome, gathering, and farewell, articulated through different program elements. A large entry plaza introduces visitors to the curatorial proposal. From there, they access a series of spaces: an exhibition of Spanish photobooks; another on historical memory and graphic novels; a 240-seat auditorium; an 80-seat forum; and a large bookstore-reading area. Visitors exit through a second plaza that opens onto a terrace-canteen.
To design this project, Murray Branding & Design studio used Garaje (Thomas Huot-Marchand) and Renotype (Radim Peško) , two typefaces distributed by 205TF.
Photos by Javier Agustín Rojas (Pavilion) and Alexander Gümbel (artisans’ process)
