Actos de lectura

Actos de Lectura (Reading Acts) begins with a fundamental question: what happens when reading is understood as an act of dialogue? From this perspective, the book is no longer simply a container for writing, but a social phenomenon shaped by multiple voices, forms of knowledge, practices, and relationships. Its materiality—paper, typography, printing techniques, illustration, format, and design—also constitutes a form of knowledge capable of revealing the historical and social conditions of its production.

Curated by Elba Cervantes and Miguel Vélez, the exhibition brings together a selection from the “Ernesto de la Torre Villar” bibliographic, periodical, and documentary collection of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities “Alfonso Vélez Pliego.” Across three exhibition spaces, it explores the historical transformation of the book and the diversification of practices surrounding reading, publishing, and the circulation of knowledge.

The exhibition is structured around three approaches. The Book as an Archaeological Subject explores books and documents as witnesses to different historical periods, focusing on the construction of imaginaries, identities, and political histories, particularly in relation to the formation of ideas of “Mexicanness” and the history of Puebla and its university.

Dialogues in Historical Memory approaches the book as a document capable of preserving and transmitting narratives, forms of organization, and processes of social transformation. Finally, Reading for Ideological Transformation examines the discursive power of publications and raises questions about access to publishing processes, the distribution of power, and the possibilities for participation in the dialogues generated through books.

Rather than presenting a linear history of the book, Acts of Reading proposes an experience of inter-reading: a journey across objects, voices, materials, memories, and forms of knowledge production. The book thus emerges not simply as a medium, but as a mediation and a relation of relations—a space where different ways of thinking, remembering, and organizing collective experience encounter, confront, and transform one another.