The Exploration Library continues a series of works that Méndez Blake has developed around the concept of the Library. For him, the idea of the “Library” (a building historically used for
keeping books and spreading knowledge) surpasses its traditional definition. In Méndez Blake´s libraries, the building goes beyond a typical single construction. Instead he gathers from several different sources and joins them to create microsystems.
In The Exploration Library, Méndez Blake begins with a real story of exploration: the story of Coronel Percy Fawcett, English explorer who was lost in Brazil in 1925, while leading an
expedition looking for an ancient city in the unexplored part of the Amazon jungle. This city, which Fawcett used to call “Z City”, was supposed to be the last legacy from a forgotten
civilization. This reference to the last letter of the alphabet has been used by Méndez blake as the beginning for a series of works the deals with the subjects of utopia, progress, colonization and the fragility of the structures of knowledge, and where the “Z”, shape and letter, is used to generate a typology of construction, an hybrid between language and archeology.
