No Straight Lines in the Ocean, 2021
No Straight Lines in the Ocean is a project that comprises 3 pieces: an installation ((In-between space), a videoperformance (Exercises in drawing) and an artist book (No straight lines in the ocean).
In-between space, Master's Project Installation, 2021
Installation / Plaster, metal wire / 3,3m x 2m x 2,5 m
This installation seeks to materialize and open invisible interstices. The work is created through the accumulation of plaster casts of the hand, which expand to form a surface. The two resulting waves mirror each other and finally open the space for the contemplation of a video showing the moving horizon line. Each made only by positive or negative copies, the waves open up the normally non-existent gap between positive and negative, expanding this in-between space to fit human proportions.
How is it that the horizon keeps seducing us? We stare, we yearn, we dream, and yet we can only approach it: We come closer to it, and then it drifts away. It's an elusive line, like the one where fantasy and reality meet. We travel and travel as if to grasp it with our hands, to find the original place where the impossible and the possible meet. This quest for understanding is vital and beautiful, but infinite, that is: it constantly creates life. We fail and keep trying.
Exercises in drawing, Videoperformance, 2021
Video performance / Digital video / 6:20min
In this video performance, I attempt to draw a line through the center of my body, leaving a bright red trail. The performance alternates with scenes of my body tumbling in the water without a reference point. Meanwhile, an off-screen voice reflects on the act of drawing as a violent yet creative act. The ocean is proposed as a metaphor for potentiality and unbounded space, where the body is freed from limits and confronted with the crisis and possibility that come with it.
Lines.
Straight and curved, forced and proposed.
Lines that shape our world.
They separate, define, suggest, create, limit, orient.
Lines that become borders, ideas, cartographies, bodies, gestures.
Some become others.
Others shape us, even if they are invisible.
Others guide us, even if we cannot touch them.
Some we draw on purpose, others only out of habit.
A line is a violent stroke.
Or also a creative stroke.
What arises from the tension between straightand curved lines?
A line is also an in-between of different things.
Neither this nor that, or perhaps both. A potential space: crisis and possibility.
What is the difference between the gesture of drawing lines
on the body or drawing with the body?
No straight lines in the ocean, Book, 2021
Literary work, artist's book / paper, digital print / 14,5cm x 10cm x 15cm
The book is a mixture of autobiography, poetic prose, suggestions for artistic exercises and theoretical essays.
Through autobiographical fragments that narrate my painful experience of non-recognition related to my family's migration and mesticidad, I explore how we naturalize categories and the impact they have on our identity and belonging.
The prose explores the figure of the ocean as a space without divisions, where multiple exchanges and encounters take place. The fragments suggest the ocean as an example of non-categorical thinking.
The artistic exercises question the meaning and possibilities of drawing lines. Finally, the theory explores other alternatives to categorical thinking through the example of various thinkers, many of whom offer non-Western approaches, to understanding the world through relationships and collaboration.
The fragments can be read sequentially, but also with the help of imaginary maps and cartographies, making the reading a free navigation game.
