El frottage y las ciudades

The frottage as an artistic technique is important, being an initially archaeological technique, it captures in detail and to scale, the state of a find, almost a fossil of the trace of the passage of time. The taking of a trace (frottage), of the place and of my hands. The place where I pass the weight of the hand supporting the graphite makes the present material appear instantly, where all the times of the place are inscribed. The memory is extracted from the fragment, the material resting on the paper is the memory made gesture. I use graphite as a revealing material, with its allotropy it is a hardened carbon, which offers a vegetable and mineral order that together will be the decomposition of the bodies, immemorially buried, agglutinated in peat and coal.

The frottage and the cities: relation of place, with(tact) and knowledge is a work-in-progress that consists of the collecting creation of trip by means of the frottage: fragments of places and the accomplishment of routes with the purpose of conforming a taxonomy from a transurban semiotics proper of each inhabited space, and, to establish points of reference, menhirs of the way for the encounter with the other. The aesthetic realization of travel as constitutive of the appreciation of cities, and, a complement to our [limited] understanding of the present. This travel practice is representative of a transnational public performance art of disciplinary, geographical and temporal crossover and is of vital importance for the appreciation of heritage and urbanism.

Then, in a selection process and with the exercise of the memory, we arrive at the conformation of a paper anamnesis. Artist’s books with the purpose of processing in results, as a contribution to a cognitive elaboration. Ideas that carry the concepts of nomadism, an important part of the development and study of cultural aesthetics since pre-Socratic times when the activity of a nomad as a spokesman was essential (Maffesoli, 2004). Also from dialectical processes, as W. Benjamin, thinking to the images, images of popular and playful culture; frottage, in the becoming of the sensitive, the images are dialectic in suspense, images moreover that are signs of a history in the detail, traces of reconstruction of a history by means of daily elements within the indexical-divinatory paradigm (Ginzburg, 1994), returning to a human essence of hunter, sharp observer.

The project has a new concept of cartography, the elaboration of visual maps through the story, and how these constructions of invisible threads always present in human culture are of vital importance to constitute us as individuals who occupy a given space of a territory: that we transform, mutate and contaminate others in a continuous creation of cognitive identities that develop with the flow of communication: a path, an image, a question, an answer, an interpretation. The work is indispensable not only to see the images again, it is to retake the conscious use of the senses in this hypervisual era, the contact and closeness with the places today that the virtual surrounds us and also to rethink history from a contemporary position.