Fundación´ace para el Arte Contemporáneo is pleased to introduce Cecilia Mandrile,  invited artist to ´ace representation at  FIG Bilbao 2020 | International Printmaking and Art on Paper Festival in the beautiful city of Bilbao, Spain from November 26th to December 14, 2020.

During years of moving, Mandrile was performing and recording ephemeral installations, observing cities and their crevices through a portable reference: sight-less dolls. Several versions of a disguised self-portrait were printed on canvas and attached to objects found or kindly given in various locations. Carrying and curing objects in buses, stations, streets, airplanes, (the self and) the self-portrait was tinted by the crossing of borders. Revisiting the journey, photographs made evident how (even apparently unanimated)  displaced subjects have individual responses to the new background imposed.

The process of translation has a double significance in the practice of migrant artists: translation as a means to move subjects/objects from one place or condition to another; translation as a technical means to articulate an image in order to interpret its behavior in changing contexts. Through the dual translation of photographic fragments, the artist proposes disjointed narratives rehearsing a dialogue between portable objects and found places.

Quitapenas : A Genealogy of Stateless Dolls 

The making of prints has traditionally involved the displacement of visual information from a source (plate, file, numeric code) to a range of substrates (paper, canvas, wood, plastic, glass, clay), generating multiple images with new physical identities, each with their own sentient body, I believe. In current times when most sensorial interactions are paused through invisible frontiers, and touching is made believed as a death sentence, print processes remain at the core of creative practices, evidencing that the ubiquity of virtual communication coexists with the urge to engage with a tangible outcome.

In Latin America, it is a common practice  for children to place tiny dolls under the pillow, tell them their worries, sorrow, fears, letting this tiny dolls do the worrying on their behalf and take the sorrow away. Exploring paper and porcelain as vulnerable matter, these Quitapenas mean tangible iterations of printed fragmented dolls that has wandered with me for over two decades, translated into ephemeral and resilient substrates via various technical processes and diverse geographies. Cut out, stitched, faded, broken apart and reconstructed along the journey several surviving pieces were rescued, assembled as new bodies, sorrow dolls that open up to a new decade of wandering and mending.