A conversation with Rosario López, her students Rafael Duarte-Uriza, Luisa Giraldo, Pedro Jiménez, Jazmín Rojas and Valeria Sepúlveda, and New Zealand philosopher Stephen Zepke.
By Punto de Fuga
P.D.F: Rosario, at the end of august 2017, you opened the doors of your studio, Manzana K, with an exhibition called La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). In this exhibition, you and your students showcased a series of sculptures inspired by photographs of Cape Raoul, taken during the time you spent in Australia. The images are impressive! Seen from the top of the island of Tasmania, it would seem as if nature was claiming back its right, towering over the sea of this remote place. The distance between the highest point of the cliffs and the sea is abysmal. These photographs mark the end point of your stay in the southern part of the Australian continent, ending in the island of Tasmania. What drove you to register this abrupt landscape in black and white?
Rosario Lopez: I wanted to photograph the landscapes that still play an important role in the political and cultural life of the aborigines of Australia. I chose Cape Raoul which is one of the places where the Europeans first entered the continent. I was teaching and doing research at the Center of Creative Investigation of the University of Canberra. After a one year residency, that last trip to Cape Raoul put a restless end to my stay.
The choice of registering in black and white goes hand in hand with the first expeditions in the nineteenth century. These people arrived to unexplored territory with intricate and cumbersome photographic kits. These first images, which were taken back to Europe and in many cases used as scientific and geographic documentation, are the first to point out the majestic nature of this particular landscape in Australia.
The black and white format allowed me to analyze each detail of the elements amassed within the photographic image and see things that my eyes were not able to detect at first glance. When I came back to my studio in Bogotá, I carefully observed these documents and saw internal structures that the landscape was hiding. I ended up making a series of sculptures, after various attempts in abstractions.
P.D.F: Stephen Zepke, philosopher from New Zealand, with whom you had a very deep discussion about the visual experience of landscape, talks about the possibility of transforming your own experience of the territory by photographing it. I would like to share that commentary: “This thing emerges suddenly, like a rock on which you stub your toe, but this shock can be mediated through its representation, it can be photographed, packed-up and unpacked back in Bogotá by Rosario Lopez. It can be trans-ported, trans-lated, trans-mitted, from one side of the world to the other, and on the way… On the way, it can turn into something else entirely. Reality is like that. It can become a line, a form, a symbol or another abstract idea, or perhaps an uncanny feeling – death brushing your cheek on its way past. Or it can just be art”, and ask you: how did you manage to deal with the immensity of that territory? What negotiations did you establish with that impressive landscape? What were the limits you had to face with the photographic work?
Rosario López: As a visual artist, I have been influenced by the romanticism of the 19th century, the landscape of a man contemplating nature, being overwhelmed by the hidden forces of the landscape he observes; the wind, gravity, the light, that are permanently shaping that landscape. These elements have always been a concern for the artist throughout art history.
I have worked with those elements contained in the landscape in many ways: I was astonished by the subtlety of the wind giving shape to some of the objects I exhibited in Trampas del Viento (Wind Traps) in 2003; I studied the different strategies used by small communities to adapt their life and choose their settlements based on specific atmospheric conditions in Abismo (Abyss) 2005; I’ve also been worried by the quick transformation of the landscape, by its desiccation in 359 ° and in White Fence, two exhibitions made in 2008, and in many other projects I have been developing over the last years.
I approached Cape Raoul because I was interested in limits and frontiers, the delimitation of places that become vulnerable when they are modified, transformed either by political decisions or simply because of the interaction of extreme forces of nature. A cliff is a wonderful example of a natural border. It shapes a specific place, indicating the presence of a physical shift in the landscape; a change from a solid state to a liquid state, a vertical plane or a monument that blocks or interrupts the endless line of the horizon.
The photographic work was challenging because it imposed another kind of limit, a formal one. Photography could be seen as a different form of cartography, and it allowed me to imagine different frontiers in the landscape. This immense space is now contained inside a frame, inside a photograph. As an image, so monumental in scale, it allowed me and still allows me to transmit my own experience of seeing this cliff, but as a medium, meaning photography, it is not enough.
P.D.F: You are right. Being in a landscape goes beyond what a photograph can portray. It must be difficult to transmit the experience, the feeling of standing at the physical geographical limit of a continent. After spending time looking at your photographs, it doesn’t feel like they are only a series of topographical documents. There is something more than a formal use of photography. There is something beyond that geographic presence, a search for a new language, an abstraction that breaks up the documental language of the first Europeans setting foot there. In these photographs of Cape Raoul there are multiple forms, these “things” that Zepke mentions, that seem to have stepped out of their own reality to become abstract reliefs. Maybe pure expressions of the rock formations that you encountered. While we’re on the topic of abstraction, you’ve mentioned that Robert Morris has influenced your work. Did his work influence your path to photographic abstraction?
Rosario López: People always ask me if I am a photographer or an artist. I am a sculptor. I use photography as a tool to understand all the information that a landscape contains. Visualizing the landscape is the first step before abstracting and decanting its forms. Then, I experiment with materials to reach a certain level of abstraction.
Robert Morris and Carlos Rojas have been influential in my work. Morris experimented with materials such as felt, defying the forces of gravity and transforming a determinant pattern in order to invert the horizontal and the vertical axes; a wonderful exercise of delicate observation. The influence of Carlos Rojas has to do with my artistic vision. His pictorial world has shaped a specific observation of the landscape and an exercise of purification of the geometrical form using different planes and lines.
P.D.F: The sculptural work emerged from those first images. I would like to talk about the materials and understand the way you approached them by looking at the photographs. When you mentioned the sculptural work you did with your students, you said it had to do with a formal effort to shape geography as a malleable body. This malleable approach translates a critical vision and an artistic sensibility of the natural landscape to a physical piece. It starts off from a broader reflection about the connections between art and landscape, but also from a very personal concern of yours, which is about the fragility of materials and their possibility of becoming something else: a sculpture, for example. How exactly did you start abstracting these forms?
Rosario López: Many years ago, Gustavo Zalamea asked me if my work could be read as a political. I think it can. My research has always been about the need to move, broaden the limits of knowledge and transmit the experience of landscape to a wider audience. Instead of using the images as a literal translation, I aim to translate the physical and poetic sensation of the landscape. By experimenting with different materials, I feel that a sculptural approach makes this physical experience possible.
When people ask me about the abstraction of form, I think about a strange personal need of trying to make objects and forms lose their weight yet maintain a certain presence. I am interested in the subtle limit between form and its disappearance. This is why I’m so precise with how I choose my materials. Lightness and the ephemeral condition of things have always guided my research. Searching for and experimenting with new materials has allowed me to express these ideas in my pieces.
P.D.F: The photographs are just the beginning of a deeper research of the lightness of forms, a sculptural research for a malleable and yet resistant material to work with. As a teacher of the faculty of Fine Arts in the National University of Colombia, you decided to integrate some students into your research process. Most of you ended up working with clay, sculpting a living material; actual land. You said you wanted to explore the idea of the border, thinking every sculpture and every drawing as “organic entities, oscillating between quietness and firmness, mobility and uncertainty”. What is this uncertainty you look for exactly? How much drifting, going back and forth with no specific intention, did you and your students do while experimenting?
Rosario López: I had a very unique experience with a small group of students of the Fine Arts program. Those students were asked to join me in the studio, under the careful guidance of research and teaching. It was a very generous process of research and creation that shifted and blurred the lines of the classroom for a while. During an entire year, we developed a research project called La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) with the support of the National University, the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art in France.
The students worked in my studio for six months. We managed to gather a series of works produced by each one of the students, based on a first experience of observation of the photographs I had taken at Cape Raoul. We used traditional materials like plaster, felt and clay to make the sculptures. These materials were forced until forms were abstracted, losing material along the way or even fracturing it slightly. I was interested in letting these young artists experiment, and letting them choose their own starting point, based off of my photographs. I accompanied them, and along the way suggested some routes that they, with their own sensibilities, decided whether to incorporate into their works or not.
As for drifting, it functioned as a unique work experience. The studio suddenly became a meeting place, a place of constant searches and experimentations. It was not at all tied to academic commitments, instead it was aimed and fueled by the aspects of producing work as professionals, with a real studio practice and a clear goal.
P.D.F: In the exhibition, there were series of drawings, sculptures, tapestries and other geometrical pieces on the wall. What do these translate?
Rosario López: The exhibition at the studio, Manzana K, gathered all the burned clay sculptures we made in Bogotá. Those pieces were fired in Villa de Leyva, at Alberto Llano’s studio, an artisan specialized in ceramics. Apart from those sculptures, the students worked with plaster, thinking about the negative spaces that certain volumes could create. I chose felt, to replicate a malleable geometry and explore different ways of distorting it.
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: In my case, it was all an impulse. I looked at the photographs, looked at the forms, finding in the empty spaces between each fracture of the stone, and then I let that first impression shape the clay. I observed the texture to find a rhythm and through that rhythm I let the lines come out to make the drawings.
P.D.F: Working with these materials is also a way of replying to those images you(Rosario) took, a way of reestablishing a physical relationship with the rock you saw through the filter of the photograph.
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: I chose clay. With that material, I created plates as if they were pieces of skin that I would then work with to leave my fingerprints and other objects imprinted on them to create textures.
Rosario López: At the beginning of the experimental work we all started to make drawings with different mediums and on different materials. Then everyone was free to drift, and look for materials that would fit their own personal research on void and form. Clay is a very malleable material, very rich formally speaking. It was the element that brought more expressiveness and clarity to the young artists’ first intuitions.
P.D.F.: What do these pieces translate from the photographs they were born from?
Valeria Sepúlveda: For me it was about building a structure out of a specific yet unknown place. There is someone who describes the details of that land: vertigo, remoteness, mystery of the organic composition, etc. even then, some things are left behind like the smell, the sound, the temperature of the air, the texture of the soil and the presence of the sea. With a few clues I started making decisions that allowed me to start working on a form.
I thought of how to reduce a landscape into only one piece, and what would be the right way to interpret a huge cliff with one material . Each one of us interpreted this in our own way and started working. Wire, pencil, plaster, felt and so on…Those were the elements that were inside the studio. Each one, working at their own rhythm while becoming creators of new landscapes. Some of us found similar methods of work and joined force, inspiring hybrid forms; others remained solitary doing their creative work. After having repeatedly applied our methods with consistency, doing constant gestures in search of a form, all through an experimental exercise, the mountain started to emerge out of the matter. There it was, in front of our own eyes, the mountain.
Luisa Giraldo: The photographs were a space that pushed me to conquer a line that insists on being vertical; the effort that characterizes the horizon becoming a diagonal in the mountain and a line in the abyss. It was all about symbolically conquering that territory that introduced its own particular rhythm, a coexistence between that body made of rock and mine. Could it be a line? Could it be burning lava? Or was it layers of different times inhabiting the empty space?
P.D.F.: In some cases, you had to add matter to find forms, in others, the work consisted in subtracting that matter to find what the erosion, the wind and the salt sea where sculpting over the Australian cliff. Was that a topographic work, a plastic work or a sculptural one? How would you define it?
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: It’s topographic and sculptural. It is my body giving itself to that artistic practice. While I make that piece, I observe it, I search in that experience another motif in order to continue working. That way, it’s not important anymore to know if it’s about a photograph that I remember or if it’s what I take from it, now it’s my body forming a sculpture, here, in the studio in Bogotá. What matters now is the feeling of the temperature, the sounds, the noises surrounding me in that specific place of work while I am making the sculpture.
Pedro Jiménez: This project was for me a process of analyzing a specific geographic location and seeing how a territory is created from a dynamic of forces. Its inhabitants are bodies where a power relationship with the wild nature is established and determined. The geological forces express themselves through out those territories, they have the capacity to modify and transform them. The limits and the frontiers could be permeable or rigid. They are fixed forms or in many cases, and for many reasons, they can travel. Within these frontiers, doors are installed, opened up for continuous access or closed. It is also possible that these limits could be erased or become blurred by the same forces of nature or human forces that insist on overcoming their own powerlessness over nature.
There are territories that are more accessible for the human being than others. But none of them have remained unexploited. The use of recent technology, their own inner dynamics of colonizing and resource exploitations has allowed human beings to devastate the living matter of those landscapes. From internal forces within nature, matter is created. Geological accidents are the result of complex processes where many agents intervene. All those forces are in permanent collision and resistance.
P.D.F.: Right! In one of her texts Jazmín Rojas talks about the resistance of matter. She says:
I approach this place from a comprehension of natural logics, geological phenomenon, forces that surpass me and belong to a different time that I cannot conceive. This impulse is transformed into an attitude, same as when water hits the rock, to make space, to become shape, to become void. I become the breath of the water that hits, I become an apparition of effort, of a resistance.
I wonder what were the many ways you found to work with that void, the vertigo and the absence of matter she mentions, with a landscape that only Rosario experienced first-hand?
Rafael Duarte-Uriza:
It is about translating a sensation captured in the photograph. Of recognizing the void, of what is or in this case, an abyss, where I am not present, and never was. Of also recognizing what is left from that process. From that point, to start looking for what that place can become in me, propelled by the visual stimulus (the photograph) and throw myself into the abyss of producing with a certain material. Embracing and confronting a material while being observant of those frozen moments taken by Rosario.
P.D.F.: Alberto Llanos, the craftsman you worked with to give your clay sculptures a black color, shared his knowledge on working with burnt clay. The work started with photographs and it seems to conclude at Alberto Llanos studio in Villa de Leyva. What did that process of burning the land mean to you?
Rafael Durate-Uriza: Fire is what gives mud the opportunity to become something else, it gives the land a different state of fragility. The technique we learned in Villa de Leyva makes me think about the way that certain actions, slowly shape the material. In the combustion process the black color invades the room, it creates a new skin and changes the piece into something else. We still know it’s still ceramics, but black changes our perception, it’s as if we’re looking at a piece of coal. The piece somehow changes its nature.
P.D.F.: In the exhibition there were photographs, drawings, sculptures and some large pieces of felt hanging from the roof of the studio. I was impressed by some of Rosario’s felt pieces, made of fragments of black fabric. The geometrical drawing made in two dimensions, looked like silhouettes jumping off the stone. Geometric lines that look more and more fragile as we get closer to it.
I was wondering if there was any geographic memory contained in that specific work and how it is related to the photographs?
Rosario López: It’s interesting that you mention it. At this point in my life, as an artist I feel that my work is about abstracting a form and searching for a line that defines the entire volume of a shape. It is as if I was dissecting the landscape, using lines as a main support for my sculptural work. I think this process is resumed in one exercise, drawing. It is something that can start by a simple observation and end up being the solution for a very synthetic form of abstraction later on.
The drawings I build as three dimensional use materials that have been considered very important in the history of sculpting and are still relevant today. It is difficult to describe those pieces as drawings or as sculptures as they can be a mixture of both techniques. For me they are the result of that abstraction process I have been talking about previously.
P.D.F.: ¿What is that experience of the elasticity of landscape about? What other creative possibilities did this elasticity bring to your work?
Rosario López: To describe and think of the landscape as elastic when you always have been used to seeing its limits as rigid and difficult to manipulate, is interesting. I like that idea. By seeing those natural forces that inhabit the landscape, I can translate them into a sculpture. We adapt and propose structures so that we can control these uncontrollable forces, looking for a better way to exploit them. In the end I feel that it’s a constant negotiation between many parts; the forces of nature we can’t control, our proposed structures and our adaptability.
The same negotiation takes place when it comes to sculpting. It first appears with the selection of the material; this big unhandled force I have to learn how to manipulate without breaking it; then I have to establish limits that could allow me to manipulate that material until I reach the desired form. In the end, it all depends on chance and of forces that show up depending on context. At that specific point, the destiny of those objects doesn’t belong to me anymore. It becomes subtler and poetic, that way becoming a sensation that only the public can experience.
P.D.F: At this point of the conversation, I would like to ask Stephen Zepke a few questions.
Stephen, the last time Rosario spoke about your work was at the opening of her exhibition La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). She shared her personal experience with the Australian landscape in general and more precisely with the abysmal landscape of Cape Raoul, a cliff located in the Australian island of Tasmania. What she said reminded me of your commentary on three of her former works Abismo, Insufflare and White fence, three installations based on three different landscapes: Playa Trébol in Peru, Marnay in France and the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina. Rosario’s photographs of Cape Raoul and the invisible forces that we have mentioned of remind me of your text entitled The Artistic Cartography of Sensations. Do you think an artist can transmit the experience of being in a landscape through their work? How would you define this experience?
S.Z.: In my experience of Rosario’s work she often employs the same elements: photos of an impressive landscape, objects or an installation connected to this landscape, and works on paper. In La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) she added the important element of collaboration with some of her students, who produced ceramic pieces that reflected their impressions of her photographs of Cape Raoul. Rosario’s work seems to begin with a photographic confrontation with Nature, and then continues through a series of reflections, refinements and returns in various mediums and from different perspectives. The question then, is what is the nature of these reflections?
Rosario’s work contains the same forces that inhabit and shape the landscape, and that she felt when documenting this place. In fact, although beautiful in themselves, these photographs could also be thought of as simply documenting Rosario’s presence at Cape Raoul, and the subsequent works – the metal sculpture, the felt drawings, the ceramic work and the felt curtain – as expressing or elaborating that experience. In other words, Rosario abstracts her experience into lines, and these lines do not so much represent the place but registers its geological forces in different materials, where they give rise to new sensations and experiences.
In my essay, I understood this process as an expression of the forces that have made the landscape, which appear in an analogical form in her work. In this sense, Rosario’s work is a series of landscapes that are composed by the same forces as those that made the original landscape she photographs, so both analogically expressive of them, but also repeating them in new materials and with new results. This is a non-representational idea of art in which the Aristotelian holomorphic model of a form being imposed on matter is replaced by an idea of art as producing an aesthetic sensation that expresses matter-force. This is an idea that goes back at least as far as Cezanne, who explicitly sought to capture the forces of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or even more humbly, the force of germination that produces an apple. This concept of analogical expression is central to the work of Gilles Deleuze.
There is however, another way of approaching Rosario’s work, one that I have thought more about since seeing La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). This approach focusses on what the previous account leaves out, and that is the status of the photograph, and its relation to the process of reflection it sets in motion. The photograph stands in for the landscape it represents, whose actual absence is what makes the process of reflection that emerges from it possible. In this way, the actual absence of Cape Raoul that the photograph both hides and presents produces echoes of itself in the works that come after it. A kind of serial music – a requiem perhaps – that represents the landscape’s force, but only by singing of what it lacks. Here Rosario’s work would be understood as metaphor rather than analogy, and all these black pieces and drawings would inevitably speak of a certain kind of death. And Cape Raoul then rises again in this artistic after-life….
P.D.F: In The Artistic Cartography of Sensations you said that there was a crucial element in Rosario’s work, one that allowed us to perceive chaos in nature, a sublime disorder and forces that are contained in nature and that emerge in a very ambiguous way through a work of art. What can Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari say about La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) if they had been confronted to it? What has been your perception of that Australian landscape that is so familiar to you and that you now see through someone else’s eyes?
S.Z.: I have more or less ventriloquized Deleuze’s reaction to Rosario’s work (or my imagination of what it might be) in ‘The Artistic Cartography of Sensations’. The concept of art as an analogical expression of matter-forces is one of his most important (Guattari has another way of approaching art which is compatible with Deleuze’s but also different). What is perhaps more interesting for me to think about is my recent reaction to Rosario’s wonderful photos of Cape Raul, which happened quite a few years after writing that essay. I never visited Tasmania during the six years at the end of the 90s when I lived in Australia, so I do not have a personal experience of this place. And in fact, when I look at these photos I am not reminded of Australia at all, but of other places where I have seen basalt rock formations of this type, most impressively the Svartifoss (Black falls) and at Vic in Iceland. Actually, these rock formations are utterly atypical of Australia, and are perhaps unique in the Southern hemisphere. If they express Australia, it is a foreign “outside” of Oz.
Consequently, Rosario’s photos operate like a kind of wormhole in time and space, through which her images connect to other images and feelings via memory or imagination. It is not that memory, imagination or metaphor lack of strength, It is that strength is filtered by a cognitive processes such as recognition and comparison that tend to be ideal rather than material, representational rather than analogical, discursive rather than abstract. A simple way to make this distinction is to think of how the rock towers in the photographs remind me of other places, rather than make me feel the singular movement of their force. The photograph, in other words, turns the place into a sign or signifier, which can then make limitless connections to other representations that resemble it both literally and metaphorically. In this sense, Rosario’s photos become more personal for the viewer, because they make their connections according to the individual subjectivity that experiences them. But at the same time, they also become less specific inasmuch as they become dissipated into an infinity of ‘meaning’, rather than carrying the quite specific matter-forces of their place. How can it do this? I think the main, and most interesting reason, is that photographic representation operates by standing in for, but also repressing the actual place, and so comes detached from it. Rosario’s photos therefore present an absence – Cape Raoul – but this presence/absence gives rise to a “stream of consciousness”, a cognitive journey perhaps, tracing memories and associations into the ideal infinite.
In a way, these two readings of Rosario’s work trace in miniature the fundamental conflict animating aesthetics and art theory since the “Conceptual turn” of the late-60s. If today’s art is “post-conceptual”, as it seems undeniable, then we must nevertheless understand how the forces of aesthetic sensation interact with conceptual processes within contemporary artistic practices. In other words, it is not a question of choosing one over the other, but of exploring the many ways in which they interact. It is only in this way, I believe, that art can make a valuable contribution to the future that awaits.
P.D.F: Rosario, I feel that your experience with the landscape has become more and more intense with this exhibition La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). But the prolific dialogue you engaged with remote landscapes doesn’t end up there, does it? You were visiting Carquefou, a small town in France located nearby the city of Nantes to participate in a collective exhibition entitled The Way Things Fall curated by Alejandro Martín Maldonado. During that short journey, you travelled to the northeastern region of France, to another “end of the world” location, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The installation that you made for that exhibition closes a cycle in your artistic practice, made up of different experiences of remote landscapes all over the world. What was your experience with that other geographic limit? What did this installation allow you to end or conclude exactly?
Rosario López: I am very interested in visiting places that I am curious about but still very distant to my own geography. I am drawn to landscapes that are not familiar at all, places where I don’t really feel comfortable. The geographic region of Finisterre is at the western-most part of France. Like Cape Raoul, it represents a territory of mountains and cliffs intensively shaped by the sea. I was impressed by the strong winds that cross the relief from side to side, obliging you to walk carefully.
The Way Things Fall, an exhibition organized by the Regional Fund of contemporary art in France at the region of Pays de Loire, had very much to do with a deep reflection on the way we perceive the fall from a specific geographic location, interpreted through sculpture and projecting it existentially. I based my work on the pieces I made for La Tierra Importa and made an installation with soft and malleable organic materials, where the spectator could walk through and feel welcome. The limit of this piece was constructed with an artificially created structure and membrane, and due to the nature space I wasn’t able to use any kind of normal medium. I established a limit through a membrane that I ended up suspending on the floor, to give the spectator a sensation of lightness and fragility of the landscape. This last installation completes the sculptural work I did for La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). They all talk about the same ideas: a territory, its limits, a body affected by the forces that shape it.
P.D.F: Luisa Giraldo talks about the symbolic conquest of the territory through art. In what moment did you feel there was a coexistence between the land, the sculpture and your own body? How do you determine the frontier that puts a distance between you or joins you to and the geography?
Rosario López: From the beginning La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) was about determining that line we call a frontier: an organic line that expands and contracts depending on the elements that affect it. In certain cases, that line is determined by the geography, in others by a political determination. But what interests me is the frontier, the line as a sensitive limit.
From all these processes, I now think of and recognize my own body as a malleable territory that is also being influenced by the different contexts I am exposing it to. The same happened with the sculptural pieces I built in France. I had assigned a limit and a materiality but that piece of work was also affected by the walls of the museum that accepted it. The photographs that I included worked as documentary pieces, as information showing the experience I had with that landscape, that inspired my sculptural work. They were black and white invitations that seduces and contaminated the spectators gaze, inviting the public to look beyond the frame and into a place that includes the five senses.
P.D.F. Before we finish, I would like to talk about your work within the art circuit in Bogotá. In 2015, SN Gallery in La Macarena did an exhibition entitled Un lugar extraño (A strange place) with that work. In that first exhibition, the first after coming back from Australia you were wondering how the photographs of an Australian landscape, the preliminary studies of the felt figures and then the sculptures inspired by the Ayers Rock monolith would inhabit that exhibition room and recreate a sensitive territory. What was the result of that first exhibition? What did the dialogue with Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, the curator of that exhibition, bring to your previous reflections about voids and form within an exhibition space?
Rosario López: After two long years of silent work I was invited by SN Gallery at La Macarena to exhibit what I was still working on. The exhibition Un lugar extraño was inspired by my experience of the National Park of Uluru and Kata-Juta, the central desert in Australia. Based on the stories told by the aborigines describing the immensity and transcendence of the monolith Ulurú, I transcribed and shared as small documentary excerpts in the exhibition space, and invited people to experience the immensity of that landscape interrupted by the presence of a red monolith. Ulurú, in the words of the aborigines, “is there to be experienced”.
This exhibition taught me the value of what cannot be described. With photography, I can explore a place without revealing its entirety, walk the edge of a shape without discovering its contents; talk about the disappearance of an image to create a new and unknown territory. A delicate exercise in abstraction of a landscape made me recreate this towering mass of land stuck in my visual memory; an empty territory present in this Australian location.
This exhibition wasn’t only photographs, I made sculptural objects and drawings and placed them in the gallery’s space. With Nicolás we worked very hard to find a precise language, basing it on abstraction, to talk about the idea of landscape.
P.D.F.: After all those exhibitions, your project has reached the city of Medellin. Lokkus Gallery is showing more pieces of work. This time, the show will be curated by Rodrigo Orrantia. What will be the focus of this last exhibition? How are the geometric forms inhabiting the exhibition space? After all this process of artistic elaboration with landscapes, do you feel you are reaching a more abstract work, one where only tensions and forces are the only things that remain?
Rosario López: In this last part of the project I had to deal with new paradigms. The space of Lokkus Gallery in Medellin is full of new spaces that can be intervened. The pieces I show there have reached a purer and more abstract expression of my experience with Cape Raoul. As I said at the beginning, this long journey through different landscapes is driven by the need to create a specific tension between my own body of work and the space were the pieces are exhibited. The drawings, the sculptures and the installations translate the tension and the forces contained within the specific landscape. Every time I exhibit that work I think about another geographic place to recreate. That experience of the exhibition goes beyond the sculptural process; it goes beyond the narrative essence of each work. It’s about finding a new sensitive landscape.
For the Lokkus Gallery exhibit, the pieces tend to oscillate between the fragmentation and the totality of the landscape. The photographs presented near by the drawings and sketches talk about fragments of scenes that provide a partial interpretation of a certain landscape. Alongside those first images, are the sculptures made of metal and felt, seen as a formal configuration of a landscape and exhibited to give a sensation of a panoramic condensation; a landscape that broadens and takes on a new shape with new materials. I want to place the spectator in a mass of materials, in which the landscape condenses or disappears and invite him to experience that landscape under those multiple rules. This is why, Rodrigo Orrantia -the curator- and I have decided to call that exhibition Landscape Variations.
By Punto de Fuga
P.D.F: Rosario, at the end of august 2017, you opened the doors of your studio, Manzana K, with an exhibition called La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). In this exhibition, you and your students showcased a series of sculptures inspired by photographs of Cape Raoul, taken during the time you spent in Australia. The images are impressive! Seen from the top of the island of Tasmania, it would seem as if nature was claiming back its right, towering over the sea of this remote place. The distance between the highest point of the cliffs and the sea is abysmal. These photographs mark the end point of your stay in the southern part of the Australian continent, ending in the island of Tasmania. What drove you to register this abrupt landscape in black and white?
Rosario Lopez: I wanted to photograph the landscapes that still play an important role in the political and cultural life of the aborigines of Australia. I chose Cape Raoul which is one of the places where the Europeans first entered the continent. I was teaching and doing research at the Center of Creative Investigation of the University of Canberra. After a one year residency, that last trip to Cape Raoul put a restless end to my stay.
The choice of registering in black and white goes hand in hand with the first expeditions in the nineteenth century. These people arrived to unexplored territory with intricate and cumbersome photographic kits. These first images, which were taken back to Europe and in many cases used as scientific and geographic documentation, are the first to point out the majestic nature of this particular landscape in Australia.
The black and white format allowed me to analyze each detail of the elements amassed within the photographic image and see things that my eyes were not able to detect at first glance. When I came back to my studio in Bogotá, I carefully observed these documents and saw internal structures that the landscape was hiding. I ended up making a series of sculptures, after various attempts in abstractions.
P.D.F: Stephen Zepke, philosopher from New Zealand, with whom you had a very deep discussion about the visual experience of landscape, talks about the possibility of transforming your own experience of the territory by photographing it. I would like to share that commentary: “This thing emerges suddenly, like a rock on which you stub your toe, but this shock can be mediated through its representation, it can be photographed, packed-up and unpacked back in Bogotá by Rosario Lopez. It can be trans-ported, trans-lated, trans-mitted, from one side of the world to the other, and on the way… On the way, it can turn into something else entirely. Reality is like that. It can become a line, a form, a symbol or another abstract idea, or perhaps an uncanny feeling – death brushing your cheek on its way past. Or it can just be art”, and ask you: how did you manage to deal with the immensity of that territory? What negotiations did you establish with that impressive landscape? What were the limits you had to face with the photographic work?
Rosario López: As a visual artist, I have been influenced by the romanticism of the 19th century, the landscape of a man contemplating nature, being overwhelmed by the hidden forces of the landscape he observes; the wind, gravity, the light, that are permanently shaping that landscape. These elements have always been a concern for the artist throughout art history.
I have worked with those elements contained in the landscape in many ways: I was astonished by the subtlety of the wind giving shape to some of the objects I exhibited in Trampas del Viento (Wind Traps) in 2003; I studied the different strategies used by small communities to adapt their life and choose their settlements based on specific atmospheric conditions in Abismo (Abyss) 2005; I’ve also been worried by the quick transformation of the landscape, by its desiccation in 359 ° and in White Fence, two exhibitions made in 2008, and in many other projects I have been developing over the last years.
I approached Cape Raoul because I was interested in limits and frontiers, the delimitation of places that become vulnerable when they are modified, transformed either by political decisions or simply because of the interaction of extreme forces of nature. A cliff is a wonderful example of a natural border. It shapes a specific place, indicating the presence of a physical shift in the landscape; a change from a solid state to a liquid state, a vertical plane or a monument that blocks or interrupts the endless line of the horizon.
The photographic work was challenging because it imposed another kind of limit, a formal one. Photography could be seen as a different form of cartography, and it allowed me to imagine different frontiers in the landscape. This immense space is now contained inside a frame, inside a photograph. As an image, so monumental in scale, it allowed me and still allows me to transmit my own experience of seeing this cliff, but as a medium, meaning photography, it is not enough.
P.D.F: You are right. Being in a landscape goes beyond what a photograph can portray. It must be difficult to transmit the experience, the feeling of standing at the physical geographical limit of a continent. After spending time looking at your photographs, it doesn’t feel like they are only a series of topographical documents. There is something more than a formal use of photography. There is something beyond that geographic presence, a search for a new language, an abstraction that breaks up the documental language of the first Europeans setting foot there. In these photographs of Cape Raoul there are multiple forms, these “things” that Zepke mentions, that seem to have stepped out of their own reality to become abstract reliefs. Maybe pure expressions of the rock formations that you encountered. While we’re on the topic of abstraction, you’ve mentioned that Robert Morris has influenced your work. Did his work influence your path to photographic abstraction?
Rosario López: People always ask me if I am a photographer or an artist. I am a sculptor. I use photography as a tool to understand all the information that a landscape contains. Visualizing the landscape is the first step before abstracting and decanting its forms. Then, I experiment with materials to reach a certain level of abstraction.
Robert Morris and Carlos Rojas have been influential in my work. Morris experimented with materials such as felt, defying the forces of gravity and transforming a determinant pattern in order to invert the horizontal and the vertical axes; a wonderful exercise of delicate observation. The influence of Carlos Rojas has to do with my artistic vision. His pictorial world has shaped a specific observation of the landscape and an exercise of purification of the geometrical form using different planes and lines.
P.D.F: The sculptural work emerged from those first images. I would like to talk about the materials and understand the way you approached them by looking at the photographs. When you mentioned the sculptural work you did with your students, you said it had to do with a formal effort to shape geography as a malleable body. This malleable approach translates a critical vision and an artistic sensibility of the natural landscape to a physical piece. It starts off from a broader reflection about the connections between art and landscape, but also from a very personal concern of yours, which is about the fragility of materials and their possibility of becoming something else: a sculpture, for example. How exactly did you start abstracting these forms?
Rosario López: Many years ago, Gustavo Zalamea asked me if my work could be read as a political. I think it can. My research has always been about the need to move, broaden the limits of knowledge and transmit the experience of landscape to a wider audience. Instead of using the images as a literal translation, I aim to translate the physical and poetic sensation of the landscape. By experimenting with different materials, I feel that a sculptural approach makes this physical experience possible.
When people ask me about the abstraction of form, I think about a strange personal need of trying to make objects and forms lose their weight yet maintain a certain presence. I am interested in the subtle limit between form and its disappearance. This is why I’m so precise with how I choose my materials. Lightness and the ephemeral condition of things have always guided my research. Searching for and experimenting with new materials has allowed me to express these ideas in my pieces.
P.D.F: The photographs are just the beginning of a deeper research of the lightness of forms, a sculptural research for a malleable and yet resistant material to work with. As a teacher of the faculty of Fine Arts in the National University of Colombia, you decided to integrate some students into your research process. Most of you ended up working with clay, sculpting a living material; actual land. You said you wanted to explore the idea of the border, thinking every sculpture and every drawing as “organic entities, oscillating between quietness and firmness, mobility and uncertainty”. What is this uncertainty you look for exactly? How much drifting, going back and forth with no specific intention, did you and your students do while experimenting?
Rosario López: I had a very unique experience with a small group of students of the Fine Arts program. Those students were asked to join me in the studio, under the careful guidance of research and teaching. It was a very generous process of research and creation that shifted and blurred the lines of the classroom for a while. During an entire year, we developed a research project called La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) with the support of the National University, the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art in France.
The students worked in my studio for six months. We managed to gather a series of works produced by each one of the students, based on a first experience of observation of the photographs I had taken at Cape Raoul. We used traditional materials like plaster, felt and clay to make the sculptures. These materials were forced until forms were abstracted, losing material along the way or even fracturing it slightly. I was interested in letting these young artists experiment, and letting them choose their own starting point, based off of my photographs. I accompanied them, and along the way suggested some routes that they, with their own sensibilities, decided whether to incorporate into their works or not.
As for drifting, it functioned as a unique work experience. The studio suddenly became a meeting place, a place of constant searches and experimentations. It was not at all tied to academic commitments, instead it was aimed and fueled by the aspects of producing work as professionals, with a real studio practice and a clear goal.
P.D.F: In the exhibition, there were series of drawings, sculptures, tapestries and other geometrical pieces on the wall. What do these translate?
Rosario López: The exhibition at the studio, Manzana K, gathered all the burned clay sculptures we made in Bogotá. Those pieces were fired in Villa de Leyva, at Alberto Llano’s studio, an artisan specialized in ceramics. Apart from those sculptures, the students worked with plaster, thinking about the negative spaces that certain volumes could create. I chose felt, to replicate a malleable geometry and explore different ways of distorting it.
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: In my case, it was all an impulse. I looked at the photographs, looked at the forms, finding in the empty spaces between each fracture of the stone, and then I let that first impression shape the clay. I observed the texture to find a rhythm and through that rhythm I let the lines come out to make the drawings.
P.D.F: Working with these materials is also a way of replying to those images you(Rosario) took, a way of reestablishing a physical relationship with the rock you saw through the filter of the photograph.
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: I chose clay. With that material, I created plates as if they were pieces of skin that I would then work with to leave my fingerprints and other objects imprinted on them to create textures.
Rosario López: At the beginning of the experimental work we all started to make drawings with different mediums and on different materials. Then everyone was free to drift, and look for materials that would fit their own personal research on void and form. Clay is a very malleable material, very rich formally speaking. It was the element that brought more expressiveness and clarity to the young artists’ first intuitions.
P.D.F.: What do these pieces translate from the photographs they were born from?
Valeria Sepúlveda: For me it was about building a structure out of a specific yet unknown place. There is someone who describes the details of that land: vertigo, remoteness, mystery of the organic composition, etc. even then, some things are left behind like the smell, the sound, the temperature of the air, the texture of the soil and the presence of the sea. With a few clues I started making decisions that allowed me to start working on a form.
I thought of how to reduce a landscape into only one piece, and what would be the right way to interpret a huge cliff with one material . Each one of us interpreted this in our own way and started working. Wire, pencil, plaster, felt and so on…Those were the elements that were inside the studio. Each one, working at their own rhythm while becoming creators of new landscapes. Some of us found similar methods of work and joined force, inspiring hybrid forms; others remained solitary doing their creative work. After having repeatedly applied our methods with consistency, doing constant gestures in search of a form, all through an experimental exercise, the mountain started to emerge out of the matter. There it was, in front of our own eyes, the mountain.
Luisa Giraldo: The photographs were a space that pushed me to conquer a line that insists on being vertical; the effort that characterizes the horizon becoming a diagonal in the mountain and a line in the abyss. It was all about symbolically conquering that territory that introduced its own particular rhythm, a coexistence between that body made of rock and mine. Could it be a line? Could it be burning lava? Or was it layers of different times inhabiting the empty space?
P.D.F.: In some cases, you had to add matter to find forms, in others, the work consisted in subtracting that matter to find what the erosion, the wind and the salt sea where sculpting over the Australian cliff. Was that a topographic work, a plastic work or a sculptural one? How would you define it?
Rafael Duarte-Uriza: It’s topographic and sculptural. It is my body giving itself to that artistic practice. While I make that piece, I observe it, I search in that experience another motif in order to continue working. That way, it’s not important anymore to know if it’s about a photograph that I remember or if it’s what I take from it, now it’s my body forming a sculpture, here, in the studio in Bogotá. What matters now is the feeling of the temperature, the sounds, the noises surrounding me in that specific place of work while I am making the sculpture.
Pedro Jiménez: This project was for me a process of analyzing a specific geographic location and seeing how a territory is created from a dynamic of forces. Its inhabitants are bodies where a power relationship with the wild nature is established and determined. The geological forces express themselves through out those territories, they have the capacity to modify and transform them. The limits and the frontiers could be permeable or rigid. They are fixed forms or in many cases, and for many reasons, they can travel. Within these frontiers, doors are installed, opened up for continuous access or closed. It is also possible that these limits could be erased or become blurred by the same forces of nature or human forces that insist on overcoming their own powerlessness over nature.
There are territories that are more accessible for the human being than others. But none of them have remained unexploited. The use of recent technology, their own inner dynamics of colonizing and resource exploitations has allowed human beings to devastate the living matter of those landscapes. From internal forces within nature, matter is created. Geological accidents are the result of complex processes where many agents intervene. All those forces are in permanent collision and resistance.
P.D.F.: Right! In one of her texts Jazmín Rojas talks about the resistance of matter. She says:
I approach this place from a comprehension of natural logics, geological phenomenon, forces that surpass me and belong to a different time that I cannot conceive. This impulse is transformed into an attitude, same as when water hits the rock, to make space, to become shape, to become void. I become the breath of the water that hits, I become an apparition of effort, of a resistance.
I wonder what were the many ways you found to work with that void, the vertigo and the absence of matter she mentions, with a landscape that only Rosario experienced first-hand?
Rafael Duarte-Uriza:
It is about translating a sensation captured in the photograph. Of recognizing the void, of what is or in this case, an abyss, where I am not present, and never was. Of also recognizing what is left from that process. From that point, to start looking for what that place can become in me, propelled by the visual stimulus (the photograph) and throw myself into the abyss of producing with a certain material. Embracing and confronting a material while being observant of those frozen moments taken by Rosario.
P.D.F.: Alberto Llanos, the craftsman you worked with to give your clay sculptures a black color, shared his knowledge on working with burnt clay. The work started with photographs and it seems to conclude at Alberto Llanos studio in Villa de Leyva. What did that process of burning the land mean to you?
Rafael Durate-Uriza: Fire is what gives mud the opportunity to become something else, it gives the land a different state of fragility. The technique we learned in Villa de Leyva makes me think about the way that certain actions, slowly shape the material. In the combustion process the black color invades the room, it creates a new skin and changes the piece into something else. We still know it’s still ceramics, but black changes our perception, it’s as if we’re looking at a piece of coal. The piece somehow changes its nature.
P.D.F.: In the exhibition there were photographs, drawings, sculptures and some large pieces of felt hanging from the roof of the studio. I was impressed by some of Rosario’s felt pieces, made of fragments of black fabric. The geometrical drawing made in two dimensions, looked like silhouettes jumping off the stone. Geometric lines that look more and more fragile as we get closer to it.
I was wondering if there was any geographic memory contained in that specific work and how it is related to the photographs?
Rosario López: It’s interesting that you mention it. At this point in my life, as an artist I feel that my work is about abstracting a form and searching for a line that defines the entire volume of a shape. It is as if I was dissecting the landscape, using lines as a main support for my sculptural work. I think this process is resumed in one exercise, drawing. It is something that can start by a simple observation and end up being the solution for a very synthetic form of abstraction later on.
The drawings I build as three dimensional use materials that have been considered very important in the history of sculpting and are still relevant today. It is difficult to describe those pieces as drawings or as sculptures as they can be a mixture of both techniques. For me they are the result of that abstraction process I have been talking about previously.
P.D.F.: ¿What is that experience of the elasticity of landscape about? What other creative possibilities did this elasticity bring to your work?
Rosario López: To describe and think of the landscape as elastic when you always have been used to seeing its limits as rigid and difficult to manipulate, is interesting. I like that idea. By seeing those natural forces that inhabit the landscape, I can translate them into a sculpture. We adapt and propose structures so that we can control these uncontrollable forces, looking for a better way to exploit them. In the end I feel that it’s a constant negotiation between many parts; the forces of nature we can’t control, our proposed structures and our adaptability.
The same negotiation takes place when it comes to sculpting. It first appears with the selection of the material; this big unhandled force I have to learn how to manipulate without breaking it; then I have to establish limits that could allow me to manipulate that material until I reach the desired form. In the end, it all depends on chance and of forces that show up depending on context. At that specific point, the destiny of those objects doesn’t belong to me anymore. It becomes subtler and poetic, that way becoming a sensation that only the public can experience.
P.D.F: At this point of the conversation, I would like to ask Stephen Zepke a few questions.
Stephen, the last time Rosario spoke about your work was at the opening of her exhibition La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). She shared her personal experience with the Australian landscape in general and more precisely with the abysmal landscape of Cape Raoul, a cliff located in the Australian island of Tasmania. What she said reminded me of your commentary on three of her former works Abismo, Insufflare and White fence, three installations based on three different landscapes: Playa Trébol in Peru, Marnay in France and the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina. Rosario’s photographs of Cape Raoul and the invisible forces that we have mentioned of remind me of your text entitled The Artistic Cartography of Sensations. Do you think an artist can transmit the experience of being in a landscape through their work? How would you define this experience?
S.Z.: In my experience of Rosario’s work she often employs the same elements: photos of an impressive landscape, objects or an installation connected to this landscape, and works on paper. In La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) she added the important element of collaboration with some of her students, who produced ceramic pieces that reflected their impressions of her photographs of Cape Raoul. Rosario’s work seems to begin with a photographic confrontation with Nature, and then continues through a series of reflections, refinements and returns in various mediums and from different perspectives. The question then, is what is the nature of these reflections?
Rosario’s work contains the same forces that inhabit and shape the landscape, and that she felt when documenting this place. In fact, although beautiful in themselves, these photographs could also be thought of as simply documenting Rosario’s presence at Cape Raoul, and the subsequent works – the metal sculpture, the felt drawings, the ceramic work and the felt curtain – as expressing or elaborating that experience. In other words, Rosario abstracts her experience into lines, and these lines do not so much represent the place but registers its geological forces in different materials, where they give rise to new sensations and experiences.
In my essay, I understood this process as an expression of the forces that have made the landscape, which appear in an analogical form in her work. In this sense, Rosario’s work is a series of landscapes that are composed by the same forces as those that made the original landscape she photographs, so both analogically expressive of them, but also repeating them in new materials and with new results. This is a non-representational idea of art in which the Aristotelian holomorphic model of a form being imposed on matter is replaced by an idea of art as producing an aesthetic sensation that expresses matter-force. This is an idea that goes back at least as far as Cezanne, who explicitly sought to capture the forces of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or even more humbly, the force of germination that produces an apple. This concept of analogical expression is central to the work of Gilles Deleuze.
There is however, another way of approaching Rosario’s work, one that I have thought more about since seeing La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). This approach focusses on what the previous account leaves out, and that is the status of the photograph, and its relation to the process of reflection it sets in motion. The photograph stands in for the landscape it represents, whose actual absence is what makes the process of reflection that emerges from it possible. In this way, the actual absence of Cape Raoul that the photograph both hides and presents produces echoes of itself in the works that come after it. A kind of serial music – a requiem perhaps – that represents the landscape’s force, but only by singing of what it lacks. Here Rosario’s work would be understood as metaphor rather than analogy, and all these black pieces and drawings would inevitably speak of a certain kind of death. And Cape Raoul then rises again in this artistic after-life….
P.D.F: In The Artistic Cartography of Sensations you said that there was a crucial element in Rosario’s work, one that allowed us to perceive chaos in nature, a sublime disorder and forces that are contained in nature and that emerge in a very ambiguous way through a work of art. What can Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari say about La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) if they had been confronted to it? What has been your perception of that Australian landscape that is so familiar to you and that you now see through someone else’s eyes?
S.Z.: I have more or less ventriloquized Deleuze’s reaction to Rosario’s work (or my imagination of what it might be) in ‘The Artistic Cartography of Sensations’. The concept of art as an analogical expression of matter-forces is one of his most important (Guattari has another way of approaching art which is compatible with Deleuze’s but also different). What is perhaps more interesting for me to think about is my recent reaction to Rosario’s wonderful photos of Cape Raul, which happened quite a few years after writing that essay. I never visited Tasmania during the six years at the end of the 90s when I lived in Australia, so I do not have a personal experience of this place. And in fact, when I look at these photos I am not reminded of Australia at all, but of other places where I have seen basalt rock formations of this type, most impressively the Svartifoss (Black falls) and at Vic in Iceland. Actually, these rock formations are utterly atypical of Australia, and are perhaps unique in the Southern hemisphere. If they express Australia, it is a foreign “outside” of Oz.
Consequently, Rosario’s photos operate like a kind of wormhole in time and space, through which her images connect to other images and feelings via memory or imagination. It is not that memory, imagination or metaphor lack of strength, It is that strength is filtered by a cognitive processes such as recognition and comparison that tend to be ideal rather than material, representational rather than analogical, discursive rather than abstract. A simple way to make this distinction is to think of how the rock towers in the photographs remind me of other places, rather than make me feel the singular movement of their force. The photograph, in other words, turns the place into a sign or signifier, which can then make limitless connections to other representations that resemble it both literally and metaphorically. In this sense, Rosario’s photos become more personal for the viewer, because they make their connections according to the individual subjectivity that experiences them. But at the same time, they also become less specific inasmuch as they become dissipated into an infinity of ‘meaning’, rather than carrying the quite specific matter-forces of their place. How can it do this? I think the main, and most interesting reason, is that photographic representation operates by standing in for, but also repressing the actual place, and so comes detached from it. Rosario’s photos therefore present an absence – Cape Raoul – but this presence/absence gives rise to a “stream of consciousness”, a cognitive journey perhaps, tracing memories and associations into the ideal infinite.
In a way, these two readings of Rosario’s work trace in miniature the fundamental conflict animating aesthetics and art theory since the “Conceptual turn” of the late-60s. If today’s art is “post-conceptual”, as it seems undeniable, then we must nevertheless understand how the forces of aesthetic sensation interact with conceptual processes within contemporary artistic practices. In other words, it is not a question of choosing one over the other, but of exploring the many ways in which they interact. It is only in this way, I believe, that art can make a valuable contribution to the future that awaits.
P.D.F: Rosario, I feel that your experience with the landscape has become more and more intense with this exhibition La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). But the prolific dialogue you engaged with remote landscapes doesn’t end up there, does it? You were visiting Carquefou, a small town in France located nearby the city of Nantes to participate in a collective exhibition entitled The Way Things Fall curated by Alejandro Martín Maldonado. During that short journey, you travelled to the northeastern region of France, to another “end of the world” location, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The installation that you made for that exhibition closes a cycle in your artistic practice, made up of different experiences of remote landscapes all over the world. What was your experience with that other geographic limit? What did this installation allow you to end or conclude exactly?
Rosario López: I am very interested in visiting places that I am curious about but still very distant to my own geography. I am drawn to landscapes that are not familiar at all, places where I don’t really feel comfortable. The geographic region of Finisterre is at the western-most part of France. Like Cape Raoul, it represents a territory of mountains and cliffs intensively shaped by the sea. I was impressed by the strong winds that cross the relief from side to side, obliging you to walk carefully.
The Way Things Fall, an exhibition organized by the Regional Fund of contemporary art in France at the region of Pays de Loire, had very much to do with a deep reflection on the way we perceive the fall from a specific geographic location, interpreted through sculpture and projecting it existentially. I based my work on the pieces I made for La Tierra Importa and made an installation with soft and malleable organic materials, where the spectator could walk through and feel welcome. The limit of this piece was constructed with an artificially created structure and membrane, and due to the nature space I wasn’t able to use any kind of normal medium. I established a limit through a membrane that I ended up suspending on the floor, to give the spectator a sensation of lightness and fragility of the landscape. This last installation completes the sculptural work I did for La Tierra Importa (Land Matters). They all talk about the same ideas: a territory, its limits, a body affected by the forces that shape it.
P.D.F: Luisa Giraldo talks about the symbolic conquest of the territory through art. In what moment did you feel there was a coexistence between the land, the sculpture and your own body? How do you determine the frontier that puts a distance between you or joins you to and the geography?
Rosario López: From the beginning La Tierra Importa (Land Matters) was about determining that line we call a frontier: an organic line that expands and contracts depending on the elements that affect it. In certain cases, that line is determined by the geography, in others by a political determination. But what interests me is the frontier, the line as a sensitive limit.
From all these processes, I now think of and recognize my own body as a malleable territory that is also being influenced by the different contexts I am exposing it to. The same happened with the sculptural pieces I built in France. I had assigned a limit and a materiality but that piece of work was also affected by the walls of the museum that accepted it. The photographs that I included worked as documentary pieces, as information showing the experience I had with that landscape, that inspired my sculptural work. They were black and white invitations that seduces and contaminated the spectators gaze, inviting the public to look beyond the frame and into a place that includes the five senses.
P.D.F. Before we finish, I would like to talk about your work within the art circuit in Bogotá. In 2015, SN Gallery in La Macarena did an exhibition entitled Un lugar extraño (A strange place) with that work. In that first exhibition, the first after coming back from Australia you were wondering how the photographs of an Australian landscape, the preliminary studies of the felt figures and then the sculptures inspired by the Ayers Rock monolith would inhabit that exhibition room and recreate a sensitive territory. What was the result of that first exhibition? What did the dialogue with Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, the curator of that exhibition, bring to your previous reflections about voids and form within an exhibition space?
Rosario López: After two long years of silent work I was invited by SN Gallery at La Macarena to exhibit what I was still working on. The exhibition Un lugar extraño was inspired by my experience of the National Park of Uluru and Kata-Juta, the central desert in Australia. Based on the stories told by the aborigines describing the immensity and transcendence of the monolith Ulurú, I transcribed and shared as small documentary excerpts in the exhibition space, and invited people to experience the immensity of that landscape interrupted by the presence of a red monolith. Ulurú, in the words of the aborigines, “is there to be experienced”.
This exhibition taught me the value of what cannot be described. With photography, I can explore a place without revealing its entirety, walk the edge of a shape without discovering its contents; talk about the disappearance of an image to create a new and unknown territory. A delicate exercise in abstraction of a landscape made me recreate this towering mass of land stuck in my visual memory; an empty territory present in this Australian location.
This exhibition wasn’t only photographs, I made sculptural objects and drawings and placed them in the gallery’s space. With Nicolás we worked very hard to find a precise language, basing it on abstraction, to talk about the idea of landscape.
P.D.F.: After all those exhibitions, your project has reached the city of Medellin. Lokkus Gallery is showing more pieces of work. This time, the show will be curated by Rodrigo Orrantia. What will be the focus of this last exhibition? How are the geometric forms inhabiting the exhibition space? After all this process of artistic elaboration with landscapes, do you feel you are reaching a more abstract work, one where only tensions and forces are the only things that remain?
Rosario López: In this last part of the project I had to deal with new paradigms. The space of Lokkus Gallery in Medellin is full of new spaces that can be intervened. The pieces I show there have reached a purer and more abstract expression of my experience with Cape Raoul. As I said at the beginning, this long journey through different landscapes is driven by the need to create a specific tension between my own body of work and the space were the pieces are exhibited. The drawings, the sculptures and the installations translate the tension and the forces contained within the specific landscape. Every time I exhibit that work I think about another geographic place to recreate. That experience of the exhibition goes beyond the sculptural process; it goes beyond the narrative essence of each work. It’s about finding a new sensitive landscape.
For the Lokkus Gallery exhibit, the pieces tend to oscillate between the fragmentation and the totality of the landscape. The photographs presented near by the drawings and sketches talk about fragments of scenes that provide a partial interpretation of a certain landscape. Alongside those first images, are the sculptures made of metal and felt, seen as a formal configuration of a landscape and exhibited to give a sensation of a panoramic condensation; a landscape that broadens and takes on a new shape with new materials. I want to place the spectator in a mass of materials, in which the landscape condenses or disappears and invite him to experience that landscape under those multiple rules. This is why, Rodrigo Orrantia -the curator- and I have decided to call that exhibition Landscape Variations.