Artist Introduction
There is a moment when I stop thinking about what I am doing and try to follow the stream of the events that I have been triggering. I imagine this is usually described as a process, something I perceive as a fragile balance between the practice and the initial idea. It is a moment in which the horizon behind and the imagined ahead come together. I am grateful to share this gravure with you now due to the pressure of the present, which happened between the carved plates behind me, and the resilience to the coming events. It is not an arrival nor a departure; it is a partiture.
When I started working on the plates that left these marks on the paper, both with ink and with their bare carved surface, I was working to produce prints that offered a tactile experience, images to be touched and explored with the hands, whose marks could be an adventure of dings, shores, and cliffs, an echoing space for the fingertips’ journey. It is not just about creating accessibility on a work on paper.
This is the understanding of opposite forces, the singular and the community, that cannot be separated; otherwise, they will cease to exist. The records of these tensions are what is left on paper, and someone suggested it is a cyborg’s self-portrait. To me, this is the script and the partiture, the synthesis exercise I cannot put in a word, and the program of the performance I am working on. There are words I started to record in several conversations that built my singularity in the community; I accepted them, and now I am reacting to these. Understanding sounds beyond the ears; I am preparing to surface, to reverberate back the multitude of marks that come with a sonic experience.
Why did I carve and etch metallic plates to transfer these marks on paper? The hand-making of it has been a re-enactment of the sonic memories that came to me; it is a giving back exercise. I built aluminum tombstones with words I now understand as an ableist expression of the community; I always assumed these things flow away. Still, they stay with us as long as we fail in deconstructing societal ableism. Words came to me; I am the carved surface that is restituting the echoes of them. I hope you can perceive in these impressions of papers the weight, the pressure, and the resilience of the fibers that compose it.
I am practicing these pressing mediums, these forms of pressure between paper and ink, paper and metals, my carving exercises, the acid etching to understand the residual space left during each contact, this vibration that we leave behind, unnoticed, is the subject of the performance I am preparing. It is about understanding that the tympani is only one of the interfaces between us and the world; a sonic event crosses us and asks our bodies to reverberate; this performance will extract this reverberation.