Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, in this artistic world saturated with incomprehensible video installations and soporific conceptual performances, there is an artist who does something as simple as audacious: he cuts books. Not just anyhow, of course. Ilann Vogt, this Breton text weaver born in 1986, transforms literature into textile objects with a monastic meticulousness that borders on obsession. Every day, armed with a cutter and a ruler, he cuts out entire works line by line, from Rimbaud to Proust, from Homer to Kafka, to metamorphose them into tapestries of words. And when I say ‘line by line,’ I mean literally cutting the space between each printed line, without ever cutting a word, to then interlace these slivers of paper like an ancient weaver.
Vogt, one of the three laureates of the Luxembourg Art Prize in 2022, an international contemporary art prize, works in the solitude of his Breton studio with the constancy of a medieval monk copyist. This comparison is not fortuitous. Like the monks who preserved knowledge through their illuminated manuscripts, Vogt creates a global ideal library, but in the form of textile bodies. It is an act of conservation almost paradoxical: he physically dismantles books to better preserve their essence.
If we look closely at his work, we discover the profound influence of Claude Levi-Strauss and his structuralist conception of myths [1]. Like the anthropologist who deconstructed mythical narratives into constituent units to understand their deep structure, Vogt literally dismembers the text to reveal an invisible anatomy of the work. He deconstructs to reconstruct, decodes to recode. By transforming ‘In Search of Lost Time’ into a vast woven canvas, he does not just change the medium; he proposes a structural reading of the Proustian work, where time is no longer linear but simultaneous, where the narrative is no longer succession but juxtaposition.
This structuralist approach is particularly manifested in his rigorous method. Like Levi-Strauss who established strict rules for analyzing myths, Vogt imposes inviolable constraints on himself: using the text in its original language, never cutting into words, employing the entire work. These constraints are not arbitrary but essential to his project of structural revelation of texts. In his weaving of ‘Address to the Tale,’ which mixes Arabic, Greek, English, French, and several other languages, he almost unconsciously reproduces the Levi-Straussian enterprise of searching for invariants through cultural diversity.
But let us not be mistaken: Vogt is not just a cold theorist who plays with literature like mathematical formulas. His work is also deeply imbued with the thought of Jorge Luis Borges, that other lover of textual labyrinths [2]. The Borgesian ‘Library of Babel,’ infinite and containing all possible books, finds its echo in Vogt’s project to weave potentially every existing literary work. As Borges writes: ‘The Library is unlimited and periodic. If there were an eternal traveler to cross it in any direction, the centuries would teach him that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder.’ [3]
This Borgesian dimension also manifests itself in the transformation of reading time that Vogt proposes. When he says he wants us to be able to ‘read Proust in a single glance,’ he joins the Borgesian conception of non-linear time, of the instant that contains eternity. The seven volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time,’ with their thousands of pages and millions of characters, are found condensed into a single visual object that the eye can grasp instantly. This is exactly what Borges described in ‘The Aleph,’ that point in space which contains all other points: ‘[…] I saw […] the circulation of my dark blood, the interlocking of love and the transformation of death, I saw the Aleph, from all angles, I saw on the Aleph the earth, and on the earth again the Aleph and on the Aleph the earth, […] for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectural object, whose name men usurp but which no man has looked upon: the inconceivable universe.’ [4]
Where other contemporary artists merely skim the surface of the texts they use, often as a mere visual pretext, Vogt fully immerses himself in their materiality. There is something almost erotic in the way he manipulates the body of the book, cutting it, folding it, braiding it. This is not a violation of the text, but a consensual relationship, an intimate dance between the artist and the work. Look at his ‘Madame Bovary’ transformed into a dress: it is much more than an easy visual game, it is a corporeal reading of Flaubert’s novel, where the clothing becomes a metaphor for the desires and social constraints that stifle Emma.
Vogt’s work also fits into an artisanal tradition that our era of mass digital production has almost forgotten. At a time when any algorithm can generate works in a chain, he spends hours, days, sometimes months manually cutting and weaving a single work. This deliberate slowness is an act of resistance against our culture of immediacy, a reminder that certain things cannot be accelerated without losing their essence.
What pleases me is the way Vogt manages to make the invisible visible. A closed book is a hermetic object, an inert block of paper. By deconstructing it to weave it, he reveals the hidden texture of the text, its breath, its internal rhythm. The weavings of Virginia Woolf are dense, compact, those of Paul Celan are airy, fragmented. This visualization of literary styles is of rare intelligence, a form of literary criticism that does not pass through words but through pure materiality.
But beware, it is not because Vogt works with books that he should be placed in the comfortable category of ‘book artists.’ His medium is printed paper, certainly, but his true subject is time. As he himself says when talking about his incomplete weaving of Proust (all the volumes except ‘Time Regained’), he ‘reflects through matter on the unfinished.’ His weavings are stopped clocks, frozen moments that paradoxically contain the entire duration of a reading.
The myth of Penelope, which explicitly inspires Vogt, is also a story of suspended time, of waiting, of work that is never finished. But unlike Penelope who undid at night what she wove during the day, Vogt accumulates his works. Each new weaving adds a volume to his ideal library, this impossible collection that will never be complete but that tends asymptotically towards Borgesian totality.
This Borgesian dimension of his work is not limited to the ‘Address to the Tale,’ this Babelian work where he mixes languages. It is also found in his very conception of reading. For Borges as for Vogt, reading is not a simple linear decoding of a text but a complex experience where the imagination of the reader plays as important a role as the words of the author. This is why Vogt favors abstraction over figuration: he does not want to impose his mental images but create a space where those of the spectator can freely unfold.
When he weaves Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ Vogt does not show us Ulysses or the sirens; he offers us a material that evokes the movement of the sea, the passage of time, the hero’s wandering. This approach recalls the distinction that Borges makes between allegory, which is only a mechanical transposition of abstract ideas into concrete images, and symbol, which is open to a multiplicity of interpretations. Vogt’s weavings are profoundly symbolic in the Borgesian sense: they do not represent, they evoke.
The Argentine writer wrote that ‘the book is an extension of memory and imagination’ [5]. Vogt seems to share this vision when he talks about creating works that allow us to ‘feel the text and experience its aura in a fraction of a second.’ It is not a question of summarizing or simplifying the literary work, but of capturing its essence, of preserving its complexity while making it immediately perceptible.
What radically differentiates Vogt from so many contemporary artists who play with text is his deep respect for literature. He does not treat books as mere materials to be diverted, but as universes to be explored and honored. His act of cutting is not destructive but transformative: he does not kill the text, he gives it new life.
What makes Ilann Vogt great is his ability to fully inhabit this intermediary space between craftsmanship and conceptual art, between literature and visual arts, between tradition and innovation. In an artistic world that often values the spectacular and the immediate, he offers a work that demands time and attention, a work that, like the great books he transforms, reveals itself progressively to those who know how to look at it.
So the next time you pass by one of his works, take the time. Stop. Look at how the light plays on the folds of the woven paper. Try to decipher a few scattered words that emerge from the weaving. And perhaps, just perhaps, you will grasp in an instant what the writer took years to write and the reader hours to read. This is the miracle that Ilann Vogt offers us: not the destruction of the book, but its transfiguration.
- Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Plon, 1958.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. Fictions. Translated by P. Verdevoye and N. Ibarra. Gallimard, 1951.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The Library of Babel’ in Fictions. Gallimard, 1951.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The Aleph’ in The Aleph. Translated by R. Caillois and R. L.-F. Durand. Gallimard, 1967.
- Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘The book’ in Conferences. Translated by F. Rosset. Gallimard, 1985.
