about Walkin on the edge
text by Clarisa Appendino
One day in November 1974 a telephone rang in Munich. The call from Paris made a sad and incomprehensible announcement. Someone was, unexpectedly, about to die and that could not still happen. For Warner Herzog, who was a young filmmaker in those years, it was inadmissible that Lotte Eisner, the mentor of the New German Cinema, died. With the news, an unexpected impulse was transformed into a spell. Herzog took his jacket, the compass, a bag with essentials, his boots and set out on a walk towards Paris. For twenty-one days he walked with the firm belief that she would still be alive if he went on foot.
If we exclude from this reflection walking as a means of transport, that is, the way in which walking serves our interest technically to go daily from one place to another, we can conclude there are at least two other ways to do it. One is the one in which you walk without a destination, with the dedication of advancing with one foot after the other without expecting anything beyond the horizon. What I call “dry walking”. The other is perhaps the one that is performed under a rhythm that oscillates between the absurd and epic. In this case, to walk is to make walking an experience that borders on sacred.
By recognizing the way in which the works that are gathered in the room have been made, the action walking appears as a way of probing and marking the surface by which the artists displace. In the works of Mara Caffarone, María Elisa Luna, Julia Masvernat, Kirsten Mosel and Jessica Trosman a subtle impulse is filtered that introduces us to the open space, the shared space, the public space. Sneaks into the city, travels to unusual places as a quarry of imprecise sketches that are later transformed, slowly but surely, into edges of new forms. These edges materialize when cutting or piercing a flat surface, denting a weft or seemingly soft object, or marking the limits of transparency and retracing a knot of lines.
The edge as demarcation, edge and limit of an object, is the area of contact with the outside and to the at the same time what radically constitutes his figure. From walking on the edge gathers a set of works that mark this limited space of forms, traverse the arbitrary -although definitive- zone of things and move between cutwork, painting and modeling. The edge here is not so much a line as an action on the material: openwork vinyl, dented cloth, cut glass, cut wood. The relationship of the edge with the space creates a grammar and finally proposes different ways of walking on the edge of the glass, the edge of a wall, the thickness of a line, the margin of a leaf, the edge of a stain, the edge of fabrics, the overhang of a fold, the edges of the room, the limit of things.
Buenos Aires, August 2021