Dibujos de prisioneros
From: 15.02.2023 - 4.05.2023
Dibujos de prisioneros
Oh Lord! Have you felt the wrath of my laziness?
Richard Hell
The return to normality and daily routine confirms that once again we have time. That this, having returned, exists afresh. But this does not hide the fact that, in truth, our time still does not belong to us, but rather is scattered across multiple activities. We do several things at once. We break it up. It slips through our grasp, diluting readiness and rest, responsibilities and excuses. It passes us by. Even more than before.
Living like this makes one think that perhaps, beyond home, neighbourhood, workplace or city, the real place we live in is actually time itself. One in which, at that, we find ourselves only provisionally. It is in this narrow gap, between the elusive and the mistaken, that time becomes the material and space of work. Something like what happens to prisoners.
These drawings are fruit of this reality. They try as best they can to materialise its course, they trace a hypothetical key to its workings. Its resonance, template, tempo. The productive cadence of our work as operators of time and the drawing. That is why everything takes place within the space of the paper, and nothing happens beyond its borders. We are left with little margin for metaphors. In a limbo where it is only possible to work in this way.
Managing this condition is notoriously complicated. We suspect that nothing can be done except this: insistence, monotony, repetition, reproduction, fragmentation. Scrawls and time-passing. A diary of recurrences. Here there is no theme, enquiry or project. There is alienation, rage and laziness.
These sheets of paper hold the record. Prisoners’ drawings trying to give form to what apparently has none. A promise of escape.
Gilda Mantilla y Raimond Chaves
Lima, February 2023
(With thanks to Jorge Villacorta, to Eva Torres and to Roc Chaves)
Translation Spanish to English: Mary Goody