The process of Infinite

   

This project started with an investigation into the braided hairstyles of the Afrodescendant Palenque culture. Originally, many of these hairstyles were designed as escape maps and used as a non-verbal language to show escape routes during the time of slavery by transcribing specific topographic sites. Taking this as a starting point I built an inventory of braids, numerous of which had names that referred to territory. Due to the hairstyles being the origin and the enablers of free communities, I began to reflect upon the origin of my own identity in contemporary culture and as thus I arrived at the fingerprint as the specific symbol of each human being. When observing the aforementioned hairstyles from above, I identified direct and formal associations with the imprint of the fingerprint. This discovery led me to research the characteristic points of the fingerprint and I arrived at similarities with names and forms that also referred to territory: island, bifurcation, crossing, junction, deviation, and so on. I then I drew each of these characteristic points, making a specific translation and retaining elements of the landscape, nature and the hairstyle; each of these drawings was eventually made into a stamp. The work focused on the linocut in recognition of the fact that I was working with the impression left by a fingerprint, which is also represented in a low relief. I modified the initial matrices of each code to use fragments of them, therefore taking advantage of their plasticity. I also insisted on the importance of the gesture because my predominant tools are drawing and my body. The product of this work, the execution of which lasted two years, blurs the codes that I created to show through the fragment the temporal process that constitutes its elaboration, and so manifesting a recollection of that which remains of the memory. Like my fragmentary gesture, the ink also blurs this large-format piece as it fades with time. Infinite is a work in which the meanings of an investigation are extended, reproducing with the stamps of fingerprints a fiction that extends the representation of the landscape and fuses varying perspectives. The work is the result of an action, an intimate and emotional journey of a map without a place; it is a search for freedom in the imaginary. The scale of the linocut allows for complete immersion in a personal topography in order to find oneself, simultaneously reconfiguring a narrative that tries to leave behind linear time to establish itself in the infinite.