Quitapenas (The Black Prints)
Cecilia Mandrile

Cecilia Mandrile (Argentina, 1969) is a visual artist whose itinerant practice explores aesthetics of displacement. Her print media research focuses on the constant translation of wandering portraits into a tangible essay of impermanence. On her visit to Buenos Aires from New York, where she currently lives, Cecilia stopped by the ´ace studio to do an intervention as part of the Carapantallas Project, entitled Quitapenas (The Black Etchings).

ARTIST STATEMENT

In The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger quotes Degas: ‘One only has one heart’, a beating he dedicated to his life’s oeuvre. Most often, being a visual artist means a solitary attempt to follow our own heart’s pace. But what happens when that heart is transplanted into another body or another landscape—territories of unknown languages and unrecognizable memories?  Displacements threaten the stability and continuity of the nature of self, the sense of one’s core must be redefined, redesigned.  These processes hold extreme uncertainty and invite questions about forms of hospitality and collaboration as a vital venture.

Quitapenas (The Black Prints) is a project based on the inherent displacement of print-based practices,  allowing us to reflect on their potential  for translation and reconstruction. Since the beginning of the century, I have developed a series of folding dolls constructed from fragments of my body, found objects, bandages, band-aids; scanned and printed, cut, faded, broken, sewn. Throughout the journey, in various art residencies as impermanent refuges, such as Kasterlee, London, Berkeley, Riyadh, New York, Venice and Bristol; fragile, ailing fragments were assembled as new bodies over the years and rebaptized as Quitapenas, protective figures that initiated a new decade of nomadism. A quarter of a century later, still stateless in the face of a desolate present, these Quitapenas are reborn as The Black Prints, a project of errant narratives based on a wandering community. These portraits translated through various graphic processes – relief, embossing, intaglio, digital pigment print and silkscreen – surviving fragments of displacement across vast geographies, are now impermanently sheltered in one of Proyecto´ace’s Carapantallas Project. There, exposed to the vulnerability of the Buenos Aires winter, they reflect on resilience and transience, fragility and transformation.

Paying homage to Las Parcas, daughters of the night in Goya’s Black Paintings, and following the premise of the Carapantallas Project, these Quitapenas propose to rescue the heartbeat of Ana Dulce’s work Electrosensible, they rise in a gesture of help and embrace, holding like ‘Cloto’ the thread of life, a link with the work that precedes them in this territory. When appealing to empathy seems to be a subject of mistrust, the Black Prints, wandering, confused, restless, mutilated, continue in constant reflection from the remains, a sentient fragment where the unsettling notion of the impossibility of a return meets the trust in a new departure: one’s heart beating in the hand of other.