SUMER
Óscar Monzón & Arthur Larrue
(2020 - ongoing)
SUMER is a project by Spanish visual artist Óscar Monzón and French writer Arthur Larrue. Its title references the first urban civilization in history, which developed the earliest documented writing system around 3300 BCE. The project unfolds through photographs and texts — whose full version appears in the book Sumer, forthcoming from RVB Books (2026) — as well as audiovisual material, which takes form across a short fiction film, an audiovisual performance, and an exhibition installation
Starting from the photographic research started by Óscar Monzón in 2020 within his immediate surroundings, Arthur Larrue constructs a fictional narrative in which a character named “Óscar,” living on the margins of a single urban agglomeration that has expanded to cover the entire planet — Sumer — frenetically devotes himself to photographing the city as a means to decipher it, convinced that Sumer is a living entity that produces its own language.
The images produced by “Óscar” create an artificial and abstract envi-ronment that envelops and engulfs us, yet still seems to invite reading and deciphering — both in its symbolic dimension and through the proliferation of signs, as exemplified by car headlights, which resemble cuneiform writing and even transform into words and sentences in the protagonist’s paranoid vision
"Óscar" embodies the human need to find meaning and to relate symbo-lically with one’s surroundings, even in a contemporary metropolis that seems to lose such meaning as it expands and evolves.
＊＊＊
The Sumerians began to write by attempting to decipher the imprints of birds in the sand. Believing that birds came from the sky, they thought their tracks were coded messages from the gods. Although they never succeeded in reading what the birds “wrote,” this process ultimately led to the invention of writing. (1)
(1) “Los antiguos habitantes de Mesopotamia pensaban que los pájaros eran sagrados porque las huellas de sus patas sobre la arena parecían caracteres cuneiformes, y ellos se imaginaron que si conseguían descifrar la confusión de estos signos, sabrían lo que pensaban los dioses. “
Alberto Manguel. Una historia de la lectura. Alianza Editorial, 1998, p. 184.
SUMER
Óscar Monzón & Arthur Larrue
(2020-ongoing)
Sumer is a project by Spanish visual artist Óscar Monzón and French writer Arthur Larrue. Its title references the first urban civilization in history, which developed the earliest documented writing system around 3300 BCE. The project unfolds through photographs and texts — whose full version appears in the book Sumer, forthcoming from RVB Books (2026) — as well as audiovisual material, which takes form across a short fiction film, an audiovisual performance, and an exhibition installation
Starting from the photographic research started by Óscar Monzón in 2020 within his immediate surroundings, Arthur Larrue constructs a fictional narrative in which a character named “Óscar,” living on the margins of a single urban agglomeration that has expanded to cover the entire planet — Sumer — frenetically devotes himself to photographing the city as a means if decipher it, convinced that Sumer is a living entity that produces its own language.
The images produced by “Óscar” create an artificial and abstract envi-ronment that envelops and engulfs us, yet still seems to invite reading and deciphering — both in its symbolic dimension and through the proliferation of signs, as exemplified by car headlights, which resemble cuneiform writing and even transform into words and sentences in the protagonist’s paranoid vision
"Óscar" embodies the human need to find meaning and to relate symbo-lically with one’s surroundings, even in a contemporary metropolis that seems to lose such meaning as it expands and evolves.
＊＊＊
The Sumerians began to write by attempting to decipher the imprints of birds in the sand. Believing that birds came from the sky, they thought their tracks were coded messages from the gods. Although they never succeeded in reading what the birds “wrote,” this process ultimately led to the invention of writing. (1)
(1) “Los antiguos habitantes de Mesopotamia pensaban que los pájaros eran sagrados porque las huellas de sus patas sobre la arena parecían caracteres cuneiformes, y ellos se imaginaron que si conseguían descifrar la confusión de estos signos, sabrían lo que pensaban los dioses. “
Alberto Manguel. Una historia de la lectura. Alianza Editorial, 1998, p. 184.
SUMER
Óscar Monzón & Arthur Larrue
(2020 - ongoing)
Sumer is a project by Spanish visual artist Óscar Monzón and French writer Arthur Larrue. Its title references the first urban civilization in history, which developed the earliest documented writing system around 3300 BCE. The project unfolds through photographs and texts — whose full version appears in the book Sumer, forthcoming from RVB Books (2026) — as well as audiovisual material, which takes form across a short fiction film, an audiovisual performance, and an exhibition installation
Starting from the photographic research started by Óscar Monzón in 2020 within his immediate surroundings, Arthur Larrue constructs a fictional narrative in which a character named “Óscar,” living on the margins of a single urban agglomeration that has expanded to cover the entire planet — Sumer — frenetically devotes himself to photographing the city as a means to decipher it, convinced that Sumer is a living entity that produces its own language.
The images produced by “Óscar” create an artificial and abstract envi-ronment that envelops and engulfs us, yet still seems to invite reading and deciphering — both in its symbolic dimension and through the proliferation of signs, as exemplified by car headlights, which resemble cuneiform writing and even transform into words and sentences in the protagonist’s paranoid vision
"Óscar" embodies the human need to find meaning and to relate symbo-lically with one’s surroundings, even in a contemporary metropolis that seems to lose such meaning as it expands and evolves.
＊＊＊
The Sumerians began to write by attempting to decipher the footprints of birds in the sand. Believing that birds came from the sky, they thought their footprints were coded messages from the gods. Although they never succeeded in reading what the birds “wrote,” this process ultimately led to the invention of writing. (1)
(1) “Los antiguos habitantes de Mesopotamia pensaban que los pájaros eran sagrados porque las huellas de sus patas sobre la arena parecían caracteres cuneiformes, y ellos se imaginaron que si conseguían descifrar la confusión de estos signos, sabrían lo que pensaban los dioses. “
Alberto Manguel. Una historia de la lectura. Alianza Editorial, 1998, p. 184.
SUMER
Óscar Monzón & Arthur Larrue
(2020-ongoing)
Sumer is a project by Spanish visual artist Óscar Monzón and French writer Arthur Larrue. Its title references the first urban civilization in history, which developed the earliest documented writing system around 3300 BCE.
The project unfolds through photographs and texts — whose full version appears in the book Sumer, forthcoming from RVB Books (2026) — as well as audiovisual material, which takes form across a short fiction film,
an audiovisual performance, and an exhibition installation
Starting from the photographic research started by Óscar Monzón
in 2020 within his immediate surroun-dings, Arthur Larrue constructs a fictional narrative in which a character named “Óscar,” living on the margins of a single urban agglomeration that has expanded to cover the entire planet
— Sumer — frenetically devotes himself to photographing the city as a means to decipher it, convinced that Sumer is a living entity that produces its own language.
The images produced by “Óscar” create an artificial and abstract envi-ronment that envelops and engulfs us, yet still seems to invite reading and deciphering — both in its symbolic dimension and through the proliferation of signs, as exemplified by car head-lights, which resemble cuneiform writing and even transform into words and sentences in the protagonist’s paranoid vision
"Óscar" embodies the human
need to find meaning and to relate symbolically with one’s surroundings, even in a contemporary metropolis that seems to lose such meaning as it expands and evolves.
＊＊＊
The Sumerians began to write by attempting to decipher the imprints of birds in the sand. Believing that birds came from the sky, they thought their tracks were coded messages from the gods. Although they never succeeded in reading what the birds “wrote,” this process ultimately led to the invention of writing. (1)
(1) “Los antiguos habitantes de Mesopotamia pensaban que los pájaros eran sagrados porque las huellas de sus patas sobre la arena parecían caracteres cuneiformes, y ellos se imaginaron que si conseguían descifrar la confusión de estos signos, sabrían lo que pensaban los dioses. “
Alberto Manguel. Una historia de la lectura. Alianza Editorial, 1998, p. 184.