The artist Inés Drangosch intervenes in the bookstore space with her work Gatherer of landscapes (Recolectora de paisajes), continuing to work alongside Fundación Proa in its program to promote contemporary action in the foundation’s spaces.
The intervention, which Ana Gallardo curates, interweaves word and image in works where poetry, reflection and beauty are present.
María Inés Drangosch
Born in Buenos Aires in 1956, she currently lives and works in Mar del Plata.
She studied at the Escuela Martín Malharro in said city. She received an important grant (de Perfeccionamiento) from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and did an art clinic with the artist Claudia Fontes in Brighton, England.
She then conducted a workshop with the artist Erick Beltran in Can Xalant, Mataró de Barcelona, and participated in the LIPAC-Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center Project in Buenos Aires.
Since her meeting with Fontes, she began thinking of her work not just as pieces but as projects, with the installation arising as the most appropriate means of expression. With paper as an element to trigger ideas (fragility, marks, the passage of time), poetry and text as image are very present in the work she does. The artist wants her work to run some risk, be it the ink disappearing upon contact with light, the paper tearing when handled, or the blackboards being forever erased.
Of all the exhibits in which she has taken part, the most outstanding were: “Of roses, buds and other fables” in Fundación Proa (2005); “Music Box,” an installation made in Baltar Contemporáneo in Mar del Plata (2004); “Leaves for,” a project for Trama, in coordination with Pablo Siquier and Anne-Mie van Kerkhoven (2003); “Certainty of the birch that believed itself a book,” an installation in Lelè de Troya (2003); an installation in MOTP - Mar del Plata (2002 ); an exhibit in “Belleza y Felicidad” (2000); and “Unplugged” at the C.C. Victoria Ocampo, Mar del Plata (1998).
Outside Argentina, she has exhibited at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and is represented by the Jacobo Karpio Gallery in Costa Rica.
The work
The artistic exercise that Inés Drangosch has been practicing in her latest works is simple and subtle drawings on paper. Exercising the habit of appropriation, she draws poetry.
She works meticulously over different papers, which are generally thin and translucent, like tracing paper, and are suggestive of air, water or light. This is where she deposits the words she has taken from her readings.
In the project From the maps to the garden (De los mapas al jardín), she takes various texts and unites them, forming prolific, subtle, labyrinthine vines, the same ones that grow on the wall that separates her garden from her house.
For Inés, these dry, intertwined branches in winter, ferment her new designs of interlocking poems. In the pieces exhibited, she works with texts from Juarroz, Bukowski and Rimbaud.
She rewrites each of them and turns them into nature. With these independent texts, she organizes a new plot, a reading that is organized and at the same time arbitrary.
In (Maps of poetry (Mapas de poesía), she represents cartography, paths composed by words, giving the viewer references so that, having become an anonymous explorer, he may move from writing to writing, from branch to branch, reading from the top, backwards, towards the edges, or to the first word, a shared spring bud.
In so doing, possible new terrains are constantly being planted, being brought to question.
In “Leaves for …” (“Hojas para…”) she translates her own poems to color codes in graph paper.
In Rimbaud, as she reads A Season in Hell, she covers the book with tape and gently “waxes” the words until the text is engraved in the tape. She carefully stacks the leftovers in a soft, secret and irreverent grouping, like chips from a wood carving.
Just trying again and again these minimal gestures, so as to give order to a new nature.
Gatherer of landscapes
When Inés goes out to her garden, she finds words.
She passes from here to there.
She finds them fallen, crossed, periods, commas, accents.
Each of them is wet with dew.
She dries them.
It would seem their beloved poets have left them, dawn by dawn, text by text, scattered in the grass, along the garden walls, the edge of the pool, under a lemon tree, beside the lilies.
She is careful in gathering them, like the harvester, she bends down and she bends down again, searching one by one for that desired word, that word read and read again.
Later, she forms a great climbing plant of interwoven texts; they cling tight to the wall, like a lover, leaving an impression, a trace not to be forgotten.
Like the water that runs, they fall and mingle, they confuse themselves, one with the other, organizing new texts.
She rewrites, like nature, the poems she wants, she takes from them, forming a new landscape.
From time to time she leaves us a guide to rediscover the path,
Small numbers that determine the return to that first place, to that first word, to a shared beginning.
Maps of poetry, offering several possible readings
She reads a book, covers it with a paper tape that she then pulls up, erasing the text.
First, she empties them as if turning over a bag, concealing her abandonment among the grass, of what she reads and what she feels.
Later, meticulously, she arranges small strips of uprooted words
delicately, and she stacks them in a suave, secrecy and irreverent grouping.
All together, as if they were the remains of a wood carving.
Sawdust, fine and poetic.
Once again lets start again.
Another tour through a new nature, through a new landscape, through a new poem.
Ana Gallardo, Buenos Aires, 2009
