This is a sculpture of Al Khazneh at Petra carved out of a stack of books by Guy Laramee. This comes from Biblios, one of his two series of landscapes and architecture carved out of books (the other is The Great Wall). Bunch of pics on his site, check them out.
Here’s the first paragraph of his artist statement:
The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures arise, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might say: so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts ?