Temporary Spaces and Narratives Working Only with Paper
One and Many Lines
Hosted at an art centre founded around the practice of drawing, we experiment with the line as its most basic element. A simple and instinctive gesture that can take on different degrees of complexity. The process of appropriating the space led us to experience a line without a stroke, to use paper not as a support, but as a material for expression in itself.
The resulting project displayed in the exhibition hall at Cercle ArtÃstic Sant Lluc deploys multiple realities that intersect. First a simple line is drawn. An augmentation using a microscope transforms this line into a volumetric accumulation of graphite crystals. This accumulation is then represented using sculpted sheets of paper that run along the entire length of one wall as a subtle orography with imprecise borders, revealing wrinkled reliefs contrasting with smooth flat surfaces. Finally, this volumetric line becomes a model for many lines drawn by the public, leading us back to the origin, to drawing – to the primitive gesture of scratching black across the delicate white of the surface.
ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering (MEATS Master’s degree in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces)
Directors: Toni Montes, Roger Paez
Tutors: Mar Arza, Roger Paez
Students: Shaun Barton, Lorenzo Damonte, Fiona Gather-Stammel, Marta Gutierrez, Mira Kanj, Felix Köstinger-Lingitz, Ji-Qian Lai, Hung-Chi Li, Marcelo Reinoso, Laura Sanchez, Giulia Sportolari
Site: Cercle ArtÃstic Sant Lluc, Barcelona
Web: http://meats.elisava.net/
Moving Paper: Filling Up The Exhibition Space With All Santlluc’s Papers.
The final iteration of a three-year collaboration series between Cercle ArtÃstic Sant Lluc and Elisava MEATS with ‘paper’ as a general theme proposes working only with the paper already present in Santlluc.
The exhibition is the result of a negotiation process with the institution to displace all of its papers, including art on paper, leaflets, information sheets, paper signage, documents, books, napkins, toilet paper, bank notes, blank paper, etc. The installation is a comprehensive index encompassing both the displaced papers and the ones that remain in their original places because they proved impossible to move.
The project prompts visitors to venture beyond the exhibition space and walk around Santlluc to explore its paperless spaces, with the explicit aim of fostering a connection between the institution and the city, between Santlluc members and exhibition visitors.
ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering (MEATS Master’s degree in Ephemeral Architecture and Temporary Spaces)
Directors: Toni Montes, Roger Paez
Tutors: Luz Broto, Roger Paez
Students: Ihab Al Baraki, Sara Bhaty, LuÃs Cabrera, Elise Chukri, EstefanÃa Cortés, Partitosh Hatolkar, Amira Ihab, Ridhima Malhotra, Camille Moins, Mariana Magalhaes, Anna Piliugina, Èrica Soler, Jessica Tallabas, Nieves Torbado, Lijing Wang.
Site: Cercle ArtÃstic Sant Lluc, Barcelona
Web: http://meats.elisava.net/
Paper Geographies
Paper Geographies is a project tailor-made for the Cercle ArtÃstic Sant Lluc, Barcelona’s art centre focused on drawing. Whereas paper is usually simply to draw on, in Paper Geographies we explore paper as something to draw with. Freed from its condition as a voiceless support, and used as a material to build spaces and tell stories, paper takes on surprising qualities, a far cry from its usual connotation as a familiar, banal material of little value.
Paper Geographies centers on building an installation through a process of working with our hands. Students produce the pieces using toilet paper that has been made into pulp. That is how each unit of the installation is produced, accompanied by a conscious reflection on the poetic qualities acquired by a very underrated material.
Using small pieces, Paper Geographies aims to build a space, or, better yet, an immersive environment. The idea is to get beyond the format of portable art, to be hung on a wall, which is associated with drawings on paper. Using paper to draw space, we hope to generate a more complicit, playful relationship between work and observer, based on an interaction that lets visitors discover the qualities of the work on their own terms.
Light becomes a fundamental element to activate the geographies of the paper, shifting sizes with shadows and transforming qualities with the play of translucencies. The light, controlled by visitors, activates a series of analogic and static objects (the paper scales) in a performative and dynamic environment, in which it becomes impossible to differentiate between work and observer.
Paper Geographies takes unassuming paper and subjects it to an alchemical transformation, generating a dance of geometries and textures that evokes fantasy worlds, both far-flung and nearer by; lunar landscapes through a telescope, fermenting bread dough seen against the light, bacteria colonies under a microscope, and so on. Operis processio multum Naturae placet.
