"Nothing could have prepared us - Everything prepared us".

The article focuses on Wolfgang Tillmans's exhibition "Rien ne nous y preparait - Tout nous y preparait" ("Nothing could have prepared us - Everything prepared us") at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, staged before the institution’s five-year closure for renovation. Tillmans’s intervention engages with the emptied Bibliothèque publique d'information (Bpi) library space, reflecting on the Pompidou’s architectural and ideological legacy amid contemporary political and cultural uncertainties. The exhibition features thematic clusters of Tillmans’s work spanning nearly four decades, including installations that critique knowledge classification systems like the Dewey Decimal System, highlighting their colonial and Eurocentric biases. Through architectural remnants, deselected volumes, and repurposed library furniture, Tillmans meditates on institutional memory, the evolving role of physical libraries, and the fragility of public knowledge in a digital age. [Extracted from the article]