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Cartographies of Distance


Holga Méndez Fernández, University of Zaragoza

 

 

The experience of place, joined to the limits of our own experience, trains us with what we can't see or hear, what is not visible or audible, but it is. A fragile attempt to bring the limits, to make the contours, the relationship with objects, materials, living beings, a question to think about. As an artist, this is my work: I look and I'm looked at, I think and I'm thought about, I imagine and I'm imagined. Everything happens, nothing goes away. Just as my life is not circumscribed to a solo city, my work is affected by the contexts in which it takes place. Everything conspires and concurs so that distance disappears and becomes proximity. Inside and outside, skin and wall, air and breath, they blend together. Word, sound, line, move and shape my artistic practice, my attitude and way of being in the artistic process. Spaces and times shared in a vital wandering that allows me to connect with the world, with the other -animal, mineral or vegetable-. Cartographies of Distance presents the work of art developed during the research period spent at i2ADS, in Porto, on the Iberian Peninsula (between 2022 and 2024). It takes as its starting point the experience of movement and displacement, journeys, on foot, by car, by train. The processes and studies that follow share concerns, interests and ways of approaching what surrounds and contextualises us. Thinking and drawing as actions and acts of proximity. Sensitive distance is that distance that moves. Surface, paper, film, earth, water, air, time or void, which are susceptible to transformation, change and exchange. That place between (us). In the middle of (us). A distance that is in danger of being impressed like a photosensitive surface. It implies a movement towards. Moving towards the other. Making proximity. Travelling the distance. Corporally and metaphorically. Maps, scores, compositions, archipelagos and constellations, our own and those of others.

 

Keywords: Art in context, Limit, Movement


Biography
Interdisciplinary artist, PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Vigo, Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Zaragoza, is a founding member of Geografía Poética and collaborative researcher with the Research Institute in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS). She lives and works between Oporto, Pontevedra, Teruel and Valencia. Her artistic practice reflects these displacements. Journeys and movements celebrate the distance that makes visible the 'between', the 'in between', what is common and proper, what brings us closer and distances us in this territory surrounded by water, this Peninsula as a sensitive geography where to rethink and reactivate relations and exchanges.