“CARTOGRAPHIES OF A CULTURAL HERITAGE - A synergy between contemporary archival and editorial practices” (Project Work, 2024)

For the Master's degree in Contemporary Typographic and Editorial Practices, at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL). 

The project is supervised by assistant professor Sofia Leal Rodrigues.

“Cartografías de Palabras / Cartographies of Words” (book)

160 pages, 34 colloquial Venezuelan words about confusion, 34 business cards, 34 screenshots, 16 frames, 4 texts, 2 inserts (with a QR Code)

Black and white digital printing, on 80gr Munkin Pocket paper

21, 4 x 13,2 cm

+ 

“Palabra a Palabra / Word to Word” (video)

720p HD video, sound, black and white, 9'39

Revision: Sofia Leal Rodrigues and Carla Ribeiro 

Binding and zinc engraving: Bernardino António and Luis Valente

Printing: Joel Issac (Gráfica 99)

Content Contributions: Simon Hermida, Lídia Costa and the entire library team at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon (FLUL)

Interview contributions: Louis Porter, Rahel Zoller, Letícia Burkardt, Miguel Ângelo Martins and Filipa Valladares (STET)

This project explores how a cultural heritage can be reconfigured through the creation of a “diasporic archive”, which takes the form of an author publication. The aim is to question the position of the designer in relation to archival and editorial practices.

The diasporic archive is built from a compendium of 34 colloquial words that reflect the confusion and disorganization of Venezuelan daily life. It is accompanied by landscape and urban research into the context of the capital, Caracas. In this way, dialogues are generated on the politics of representation and an ethnic perspective of what can be “enunciated” in the archive, allowing an understanding of a social, historical and multicultural construction.

Methodologies for forgotten trails (2024)

Canvas, iron, vieux chêne, excavation dust pigment

144 x 100 cm 

Anthroposol (2024)

Inkjet print on Munken Print White 150gsm paper

40 x 30 cm 

La Patinata (2024)

Solo Show at Cecília Zino Foundation (FCZ)

Funchal, Portugal

PVC tube, rubble bags, enamel paint, spoons, styrofoam, spray paint, adhesive tape, galvanized wire, jute rope, water paint, terracotta, wood, yo-yos

Variable dimensions

In the Middle Ages, children were expected to participate in all aspects of family life through certain tasks at home, appropriate to their age and development. These tasks could include, for example, looking after the animals, helping with the family business, carrying the shopping and preparing the food. In other cases, these children's path lay through monastic schools or local cathedrals, so that in the future they could take up positions in the clergy, either in lower orders (priests) or in higher positions (bishops). As a result, many of these children were subjected to a life away from their families, sometimes to accidents caused by the trade and, in more precarious situations, to death. However, despite everything, children were encouraged to play. It was in Ancient Greece, according to archaeological and anthropological findings dating back to 440 BC, that the first signs of the yo-yo were found. There are also pictorial records depicting these children's play activities, which consisted of playing and juggling with sticks and stones.

The context described above allows us to create a relationship with contemporary play traditions, namely the famous Venezuelan Patinatas. The Patinata is considered a symbol of Venezuelan Christmas tradition, where cultural activities are held on the night of Christmas Eve, in which young people are the real protagonists. In these activities, young people all get together in the street to rollerblade, skate or cycle, and/or take part in traditional Venezuelan games. The Patinatas are the result of a mixture of various games and toys from people of ancestral and indigenous origin, who have helped shape the country's Creole culture. In this way, the traditions and identity of the Venezuelan people are preserved, as well as integrating children into an environment that allows them to develop through the act of playing.

This exhibition reactivates a Venezuelan cultural fragment that alludes to a memory of a past that doesn’t return, but which deepens the roots. The exhibition also seeks to encourage the act of communicative and relational play between children, in the face of a post-digital era that reduces play to a screen. It is through play that children develop skills such as communication with others, motor and functional independence and emotional balance. The social relationships established by children in play, when carried out in the street and without the direct control of adults, reproduce a real culture of their own, which is called “street children’s culture”, essential to a child’s well-being and development. In this way, the exhibition allusion, not only to the transcodings of symbols, references and images that are positioned and (re)appropriated, but also to the structural recreations of a Patinata - a playing field. 

Photos of details from the solo show

Courtesy of the artist

The light marks the mark (2024)

80gr recycled paper burnt by the sun

18 x 13 cm

untitled (2024)

Branches, magnets, stone varnish, acrylic

2.65 m (height)

Parallel Lands (2024)

Paraffin, pigments
30.5 x 30.5 x 2.9 cm

«To represent the land means to understand it. But such representation is not a tracing but always a creation. A map is drawn first to know and then to act. It has in common with the land the fact of being a process, a product, a project (…).This sort of trompe l’oeil not only visualizes the actual territory to which it refers, it can incarnate things which are not. It can show non-existent land just as seriously as an actual one, which shows that it is better to be prudent».  

«What counts in landscape is less its “objectivity” (…) than the value attributed to its configuration. This value is and can only be cultural». 

*Corboz. A. “The Land as Palimpsest”. In Diogenes, Volume 31 Issue 121 (pp. 12-34), March 1983.

Simple Papers (2024)

6 Venezuelan banknotes origami

(Bolívares 2 Bs.F, 5 Bs.F, 10 Bs.F, 20 Bs.F, 50 Bs.F, 100 Bs. F)

38.5 x 9 cm

"Simple Papers" alludes to an ironic game of using bolívares banknotes (from 2008), from 2 Bs.F to 100 Bs.F, using them as simple material for craft purposes, such as the origami hearts, that we can see, thus devaluing their power or transferring their "power" to a visual power. In the banknotes themselves, we can also see part of the faces of fundamental personalities of history (such as Índio Guaicaipuro, Negro Felipe, Simón Bolivar, among others), who fought for freedom and the evolution of Venezuelan culture. So the piece plays with a game of dualities, in a kind of "disappointment" of these various personalities, by looking at the current reality in Venezuela, in other words, everything that was done in the past for the evolution of the country itself is reversed in contemporary times.

The piece alludes to a speculative exercise on a symbolic reconfiguration in the codification of colors and shapes associated with entities and esoteric concepts that are devoted to the Venezuelan spiritual cult of Maria Lionza (goddess of the forest). The cult is interesting because of its ambiguity, it doesn't have a recognized liturgy, but at the same time it serves as a disseminating element of Venezuelan social-culture, with its followers growing in number for countless reasons related to faith and hope. In short, the piece wants to be able to create dialogues between historical, political and cultural reality and contemporary Venezuelan culture.

Images from the exhibition "Uncertain Neighbours",

Marmol Project, 2023

Courtesy by Francisco Iurcovich

The premise conceived for the pieces, for the group exhibition, "Anexos (dois pontos)" at Captain's Tower Museum Center, and as a result of the artistic residency, Fresh Contemps - Artes Visuais 2023 (Funchal, PT), it was proposed two starting points: alchemist cosmology and Lourdes Castro's period of the center and shadows, where they present intersections or analogies that allow for a series of plastic studies of speculations around the center, that is, exploring these palpable hypotheses about the center and what is around it, as well as questioning the interaction of bodies in spatiality, positioning or intersections, also including re-interpretations of alchemist codes.

To read the full text, go to https://www.are.na/block/23488517

The object questions or rethinks the fragments, which in turn are related to the ideas of "memorabilia" and the attitude of archiving/collecting, showing interesting particularities in ways that resurrect untold stories/possibilities/ideas…

A collection of clippings of portions from a personal archive.