In Atramento [black ink], books pages are being immersed in the water; the letters come off the paper one by one, distorting the text and making it im- possible to read.
Those pages are taken from George Orwell’s 1984, and the disintegration of the text directly refers to this famous dystopian novel’s central themes—censorship and surveillance—as well as to its main character, Winston Smith, who is responsible for propaganda and historical re- visionism in the Ministry of Truth. His task consists in rewriting records and altering photographs before incinerating the original documents in a “memory hole”. Thus, Atramento acts like a mise en abyme, as 1984’s content itself is being altered and almost falsified.
