On February 8, 2006, the remains of a beached whale were preserved by a team of specialists who, after obtaining permission from the Mexican authorities, extracted the natural oils from the skeleton’s bones. The next phase of the whale’s afterlife was a repurposing by artist Gabriel Orozco, who restructured the skeleton’s bones onto a metal armature, and deemed it an artwork to be hung in the central lobby of Mexico’s national library. Entitled Mobile Matrix, the whale has remained on permanent display at la Biblioteca José Vasconcelos in Mexico City, with the exception of an excursion to MoMA for Orozco’s 2009 retrospective.

Six thousand pencils were employed by assistants under Orozco’s supervision to create the concentric circles on the skeleton’s 163 bones.

“In the end, it was a lot of labor to fill it with graphite,” Orozco admits, “and I like the graphite because it’s like lead. It has certain qualities that aren’t like painting on the bone, it’s more like dust. I always liked the idea of this dark mineral against the bone, how they contrast.”