This text stems from my visit to Valentina Alvarado Matos’ studio, where she showed me the papers and ceramic pieces that now form part of the mural in the Fuga gallery, but also from the video links she shared with me by email while I was travelling, and from some notes that, she told me, helped her to focus her proposal. The first is an entry from a book called Mestizajes of the word Collage. It came to me annotated on nine pages. Or were they actually images? The artist captured them with her mobile phone to send them to me. That’s why, on the screen, I saw how the phrases curved slightly, instead of being flat, reproducing the natural inclination of the sheet when it is sewn or glued to a spine. Their undulation reminded me of the waves and that sense of back and forth that can be perceived in her work, forged in a continuous coming and going of places, ideas and materials that never die in one shot. Rather, they reappear in others, even in different videos, like splinters of a landscape that filters or settles over another and opens up to new configurations. In fact, the book from which she extracted her captures to explain her main methodology (collage) is the same one that appears in her filmed correspondence with Nazli Dincel, except that here it is used to press flowers. Hands place them on another page, on the H of Hacia (Towards), while we hear: ‘towards as orientation, as movement, not towards as doing’. With this distinction, the artist emphasises her commitment to transience over accomplished facts or actions, which in turn is reflected in her repeated attempts to break with the rigidity of the frame and make it more unstable.

In a piece on the illustrations in the first encyclopaedia, Roland Barthes stated that ‘to appropriate is to fragment the world, to divide it into finite objects, subject to man in proportion to their discontinuity: since one cannot separate without ultimately naming and classifying, property is born from this. Mythically, possession of the world did not begin with Genesis but with the Flood, when man was forced to name each animal species and locate it, that is, to separate it from its neighbouring species.” I mention this because, by intervening in the landscape—or rather, in its representation—or by asking whether a leaf can be spelled out, Alvarado Matos seems to be taking revenge on this epistemological violence that Barthes speaks of, which consists of separating, defining, classifying, and fixing things, turning them into concepts. Here, the artist follows a different logic: ‘I take a photo, scan it, print it, redraw it, scan it again, print it again, film it, and hang it up.’ Sometimes, it is the voice that speaks over the image. At other times, it is hands that alter the syntax of the “civilised world”, which in her imagination is suggested by different elements such as a map or the globe, a sheet of fossils, her visit to the Botanical Gardens and that idea of the horizon that reflects the linear Renaissance perspective with which America was colonised. It is worth mentioning that Matos was born in Venezuela but lives in Spain. Hence her recurrence to a landscape that continually migrates, contaminated by her memories: a landscape that no termina de aorillarse. This sensitive quality is amplified by the fragility of analogue material and the speed with which it deteriorates if not preserved in the right conditions.

“Filming is also a way of reviewing what has been filmed”. In another of her notes, I hear her translating her images into words: My father’s hands open a crushed red horizon... My hands open the remains of a map... Hands that are not mine caress... A hand interrupts a scanned handprint on orange peels and ceramics... A hand holds a photo of the background of the landscape... Finger touches lens of landscape... Hand holds photo on background of that photo... Similarly, I note that in at least two films, the people who appear in them are credited, but never in full. I connect her emphasis with another observation by Barthes, when he says: “It is possible to pinpoint what the man in the encyclopaedic image is reduced to, what is, in a way, the essence of his humanity: it is her hands. In many of the plates (perhaps the most beautiful ones) hands appear separated from the body, fluttering around the work (for their lightness is extreme); those hands are undoubtedly the symbol of a world of craftsmanship (...); but beyond craftsmanship, hands are fatally the sign that induces human essence.” In the context to which they refer, where there are countless objects illustrated in detail, they serve to mark a scale in relation to the body. Let us say that they familiarise us with what we are seeing, but they are also a reflection of a certain epic, as if the world could not exist on its own. It is “man” who shapes and manages it. I would even dare to suggest that the encyclopaedia would be the ultimate culmination of this idea. Needless to say, Alvarado Matos starts from a very different premise. It could be said that the hand, in her case, is a way of accessing the image and inscribing oneself in it. What she tells us is that the image does not exist autonomously but is manufactured simultaneously with its recording, but in dialogue with the paper, clay or water and the salts and minerals that make up the film. These are variables over which she has limited control. This idea is also suggested when she mentions the similarities between cinema and ceramics, two of her practices: “In both cases, there are times when the image emerges; when you film something in analogue, you cannot see it immediately. The same thing happens in ceramics with the kiln. These artisanal processes are marked by waiting and by the transformation of the material in that interval. The subsequent appearance of the developed images, or the fired pieces, is a reunion where the properties of these elements are expressed.”

In light of this statement, it would seem that in her work there is no active subject acting upon a passive object, but rather intermediate situations and a continuous negotiation in which other people from the artist’s emotional universe often enter. I think of her mother’s hands picking flowers or those of Catarina—our mutual friend—scraping a surface, peeling it, and I connect them with my own as I write this text, in which I interpret Valentina’s collages, videos, and notes, inevitably filtered through what I already know. And this is when I remember Raul Ruíz, quoting Huidobro: ‘Do not sing of the rose, oh poets: make it bloom in the poem’, whom I propose as an ally, since the images that appear here are also this: a sum of circumstances and exchanges.

This text stems from my visit to Valentina Alvarado Matos’ studio, where she showed me the papers and ceramic pieces that now form part of the mural in the Fuga gallery, but also from the video links she shared with me by email while I was travelling, and from some notes that, she told me, helped her to focus her proposal. The first is an entry from a book called Mestizajes of the word Collage. It came to me annotated on nine pages. Or were they actually images? The artist captured them with her mobile phone to send them to me. That’s why, on the screen, I saw how the phrases curved slightly, instead of being flat, reproducing the natural inclination of the sheet when it is sewn or glued to a spine. Their undulation reminded me of the waves and that sense of back and forth that can be perceived in her work, forged in a continuous coming and going of places, ideas and materials that never die in one shot. Rather, they reappear in others, even in different videos, like splinters of a landscape that filters or settles over another and opens up to new configurations. In fact, the book from which she extracted her captures to explain her main methodology (collage) is the same one that appears in her filmed correspondence with Nazli Dincel, except that here it is used to press flowers. Hands place them on another page, on the H of Hacia (Towards), while we hear: ‘towards as orientation, as movement, not towards as doing’. With this distinction, the artist emphasises her commitment to transience over accomplished facts or actions, which in turn is reflected in her repeated attempts to break with the rigidity of the frame and make it more unstable.

In a piece on the illustrations in the first encyclopaedia, Roland Barthes stated that ‘to appropriate is to fragment the world, to divide it into finite objects, subject to man in proportion to their discontinuity: since one cannot separate without ultimately naming and classifying, property is born from this. Mythically, possession of the world did not begin with Genesis but with the Flood, when man was forced to name each animal species and locate it, that is, to separate it from its neighbouring species.” I mention this because, by intervening in the landscape—or rather, in its representation—or by asking whether a leaf can be spelled out, Alvarado Matos seems to be taking revenge on this epistemological violence that Barthes speaks of, which consists of separating, defining, classifying, and fixing things, turning them into concepts. Here, the artist follows a different logic: ‘I take a photo, scan it, print it, redraw it, scan it again, print it again, film it, and hang it up.’ Sometimes, it is the voice that speaks over the image. At other times, it is hands that alter the syntax of the “civilised world”, which in her imagination is suggested by different elements such as a map or the globe, a sheet of fossils, her visit to the Botanical Gardens and that idea of the horizon that reflects the linear Renaissance perspective with which America was colonised. It is worth mentioning that Matos was born in Venezuela but lives in Spain. Hence her recurrence to a landscape that continually migrates, contaminated by her memories: a landscape that no termina de aorillarse. This sensitive quality is amplified by the fragility of analogue material and the speed with which it deteriorates if not preserved in the right conditions.

“Filming is also a way of reviewing what has been filmed”. In another of her notes, I hear her translating her images into words: My father’s hands open a crushed red horizon... My hands open the remains of a map... Hands that are not mine caress... A hand interrupts a scanned handprint on orange peels and ceramics... A hand holds a photo of the background of the landscape... Finger touches lens of landscape... Hand holds photo on background of that photo... Similarly, I note that in at least two films, the people who appear in them are credited, but never in full. I connect her emphasis with another observation by Barthes, when he says: “It is possible to pinpoint what the man in the encyclopaedic image is reduced to, what is, in a way, the essence of his humanity: it is her hands. In many of the plates (perhaps the most beautiful ones) hands appear separated from the body, fluttering around the work (for their lightness is extreme); those hands are undoubtedly the symbol of a world of craftsmanship (...); but beyond craftsmanship, hands are fatally the sign that induces human essence.” In the context to which they refer, where there are countless objects illustrated in detail, they serve to mark a scale in relation to the body. Let us say that they familiarise us with what we are seeing, but they are also a reflection of a certain epic, as if the world could not exist on its own. It is “man” who shapes and manages it. I would even dare to suggest that the encyclopaedia would be the ultimate culmination of this idea. Needless to say, Alvarado Matos starts from a very different premise. It could be said that the hand, in her case, is a way of accessing the image and inscribing oneself in it. What she tells us is that the image does not exist autonomously but is manufactured simultaneously with its recording, but in dialogue with the paper, clay or water and the salts and minerals that make up the film. These are variables over which she has limited control. This idea is also suggested when she mentions the similarities between cinema and ceramics, two of her practices: “In both cases, there are times when the image emerges; when you film something in analogue, you cannot see it immediately. The same thing happens in ceramics with the kiln. These artisanal processes are marked by waiting and by the transformation of the material in that interval. The subsequent appearance of the developed images, or the fired pieces, is a reunion where the properties of these elements are expressed.”

In light of this statement, it would seem that in her work there is no active subject acting upon a passive object, but rather intermediate situations and a continuous negotiation in which other people from the artist’s emotional universe often enter. I think of her mother’s hands picking flowers or those of Catarina—our mutual friend—scraping a surface, peeling it, and I connect them with my own as I write this text, in which I interpret Valentina’s collages, videos, and notes, inevitably filtered through what I already know. And this is when I remember Raul Ruíz, quoting Huidobro: ‘Do not sing of the rose, oh poets: make it bloom in the poem’, whom I propose as an ally, since the images that appear here are also this: a sum of circumstances and exchanges.