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EL INDIO

2015-20XX

Almacenes El Indio was a historic fabric shop, founded in 1870 in Barcelona. When it closed in 2015, unable to pay the exorbitant rents, several objects from inside it ended up in the rubbish bin. Among them an old account book, which serves as a vehicle for this project.

Ledger Art is a branch of art that refers to the drawings that Native Americans made on ledger sheets on the reservations where they were imprisoned at the end of the 19th century, when the last land they were fighting for was taken away from them.

On a formal level, these drawings are a combination of Ledger Art and textile art, both being a form of speech. In that sense, they also contain a reflection on the relationship between power, language and territory. In 2022 the ledger was sent to Portland/Oregon artist Alex Wiseman to continue the project.

P58-55 / watercolor drawing on El Indio ledger

P68-77 / watercolor drawing on El Indio ledger

"When the world is broadly divided simply into North and South,

the World Bank has no barrier to its division of that world into a map

that is as fantastic as it is real. This constantly changing map draws

economic rather than national boundaries, as fluid as the spectacular

dynamics of international capital".

Gayatri Spivak

P68-77 / watercolor drawing on El Indio ledger

~~Perle Di Lume~~

~~El Autómata~~

~~Silent Violence~~

~~Ghost Dance~~

EL RETORNO/Chapter 24

2015

The graphic work created between 2013 and 2015 belongs to a set of small and medium-sized drawings, the result of a methodical exploration of one's own subjectivity and inspired by the work of the American psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900-1998). In the therapy sessions I took at the time, it was concluded that the drawings represented my struggle to establish some kind of relationship with my mother, a biologist who suffers from schizophrenia. From the sequence execution/contemplation/correction, and from the tension between automatism and supervision, emerge complex graphisms, transfigured botanical representations. These drawings represent a biological origin that does not correspond to any meaningful project that can be transmitted to humans, but an earlier instinctive and incomprehensible force that engenders functional organisms with fundamental questions condemned to remain unanswered.

Chapter 24 refers to the chapter of the I-ching book, also called The Book of Mutations. It is a divination system that suggests the existence of logic and causality. The chapter called The Return is interpreted here as the return to the origin, a mysterious and vague place. The resulting portrait of the cycles of nature produces, through its aesthetics, a sense of unease.

S/T. Graphite on paper. A4

S/T. Watercolor on paper. 30x30cm.

S/T. Graphite on paper. A4

S/T. Graphite on paper. A3

EL RESTO/Body of work/Paper Towers

2020

Body of Work was born out of work experience as a receptionist in a paper manufacturing company. The title refers to the result of creative activity, as well as designating a person employed in a job. The origin of the project is a series of small-format drawings scribbled in my spare time at the reception desk with pieces of paper I was given. The name Paper Towers came about first as a joke about the name of the company, and then as a reflection on the concept of individualisation. In psychological terms, a tower is a metaphor for the self. It symbolises the functional identity that enables interaction with the environment precisely because it delimits the particular. It is complete and indivisible. As an architectural element, a tower must be solid, durable and fulfil a function of self-defence, whereas paper is a soft, fragile and receptive material. Paper Towers is posed as a question. It is an attempt to find out the role and value of modest narratives within the structures of the professional world and an attempt to find a personal space and value. Later, this body of work was renamed El Resto, in reference to the title of Jacques Derrida's book "Given Time".