The desire for a form. An approach to expanded drawing

The desire for a form constitutes straightforward research into the transformative capacity of drawing. A vision of drawing as a fluid discipline, as simple as it is flexible, that can come close to other supposedly more complex disciplines (such as art installation, sculpture, and performance) until it eventually absorbs them, blurring its own boundaries in the process.

Between the magic trick and the performance of a variety show, the desire for a form empathises with and reacts to everything that surrounds it: an agglomeration of layers formed by a superposition of references and materials of such a disparate nature that it is presented as the optimal scenario to bring contrasts together and make them complementary: the amateur and the professional, the new with the old, the alternative with the institutional, when the local becomes universal, etc. It is the celebration of a collectively-generated ritual structure.

Throughout the course, we will work on the agency of drawing to depart from the plane and take shape using the resources around it. A process of transformation and learning, not only of our own practices but also of their expansion and relational potential in dialogue with the practices of others.

Conceived as an introduction to expanded drawing from a theoretical-practical perspective, the course is aimed at all types of participants. No prior mastery of the technique is required.

• Share working methodologies that can be adapted to the practices of each student and create new methodologies through group work and free experimentation, i.e. a creative process that is sensitive to the environment and which is developed and implemented at a specific time and in a specific space.
• Explore forms of visual creation from a perspective of media ecology, social awareness, popular celebration, and position in self-management.
• Boost creativity and plastic freedom free of restrictions resulting from technical limitations, testing through practice all the phases through which an idea or desire passes until it is formalised.
• Conduct a research process from the limits and supposed contours, and simplify work processes to prevent the fear of failure or limitations (whether physical or technical) from having undue influence on our work.
• Explore shared strategies to create a structure that brings diverse practices together and allows each strategy to complement the others and seek its own voice within the structure as a whole.
• Understand the creative process as an unforeseeable element that should be able to react at each stage until the end, it being understood that public presentation is not the end of the process but merely one phase in the process. Thus, the process is the central element of a plastic investigation that refuses to anticipate or be conditioned by or subjected to immovable preconceived forms.
• Open up and allow solitary practices to be vulnerable, putting them in contact with other practices that have been generated in an equally autonomous manner. This is not a course to develop technical excellence. Rather, its aim is to explore its fissures and enhance its development, alerting us to the real possibility of affecting reality through art and of understanding and relating to the environment.

Presentation

Dynamic guided group visit to the exhibition “Time Machines, about the desire to travel back and forth in time in prison”, curated by Mery Cuesta at the Santa Mònica Art Center in Barcelona.

1. The Disappearance. Drawing.

A drawn body attempts to disappear from the plane to take shape. A new form that wishes to exempt itself from all constraints, whether in the form of physical laws or supposed limitations (whether technical or material). The empowerment of uninhibited artistic experimentation.

Participants will experiment with different materials: cardboard, textiles, paper mache sculptures, photocopies, drawings, etc. and their reaction to different actions and interventions to soften, break, erase, cut, paste, join, and mix them, etc. Put ingenuity at the service of a class-conscious media ecology.

Research consists of conducting experiments and tests on materials for as long as possible until they disappear or disintegrate. Once the material loses its form or cannot withstand any further manipulation, experiments will be carried out with destruction systems such as fire, carving, or agglutination.

2. Ash or invocation ritual. Archive.

Think of ritual forms of accompaniment in dismissal and projection. Approach formats such as writing, performance, ritual, celebration, etc. Experiment with techniques and formats that can be used to breathe life into remains. Discuss concepts such as ruin and fetishism.

Being queer by nature, these bizarre constructions reject any internal structure that requires them to adopt an immovable form.

Delve into sensitive, psychomagical, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational terrain. A voyage of transformation and self-knowledge, in which the process itself is the objective.

3. Start the house with the roof. Installation sculpture.

Illusionism: reversing the established order of things. Altered states of awareness, empathy, dreams, intuition, relational art. Allow the desire for a form to govern and direct the entire structure. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Trial and error with materials, the analysis of space, free plastic experimentation, giving a first public presentation of the projects of each person, listing, mixing, altering, and making materials complex, adding layers, forcing dialogues. Artistic production and its relationship with the affective capacity of space.

Materials that reject the nobility of origin (recycled cardboard, newspaper, adhesive tape, photocopies, white glue, etc.) will be used. It is by subjecting these materials to an intensive process of manual work that they turn these materials into what they want.