Trajectories: Variations on a gesture

Trajectories: Variation on a gesture

2022

Ink / Paper / Sensors

This work brings together the drawings made for the exhibition Trajectories, variations on a gesture, at the La Massana art centre in Barcelona in 2022, a collaboration between 10 of its students and Edouard Cabay.

The research initiated within an art residency within the Centre highlights the interaction between the artist and students from the school, coming from 10 different manual disciplines such as pottery, weaving, or sculpture. Brought out of their workshops, with their projects and tools, they came to work at Sala Busquets, a public space converted into a temporary laboratory, where their movements were scanned in three dimensions. Thanks to the use of algorithmic syntax, the artist then translated this data into 10 drawings, each composed of a single, long curve representing the trajectory of the hand, extrapolating 100,000 times the repetitive movement of the gesture with the tool. The series of ten drawings captures and reveals the infinite repetitions and variations of human movements contained in the almost automatic action of the craftsman when working with the material.

Trajectories forms a catalogue, not of artefacts but of the performance of their making, a sampling of hand gestures. The focus is not on the result but on the process. The work is therefore an archive in the form of a catalogue of movements: a series of drawings on different media, both digital and analogue, an index of the artistic practices of the Massana school from the beginning of 2022.
 

Direction: Edouard Cabay

Collaborator: Peter Magnus, Soroush Garivani, Francesca Piñol and Martina Morittu.