The trace of matter: An archaeological inclination to the memory of the print

Abstract

I have been working on the project presented in this thesis since the beginning of 2022, the year in which I started researching what happens conceptually at the moment I am producing printmaking, and everything that goes into creating a series. This project consists of an investigation of my relationship with printmaking and memory, of what a matrix can be at the moment of having an experience within the space, and of the possibilities of patterns that build a code that will later become symbols within the represented landscapes. Throughout the research a code is created by means of the following concepts, code, matrix, transmission, print, object, sign and symbol, metonomy, archaeology, transition, projection and threshold. I will also mention briefly what landscape and geography are for me and how they have influenced my artistic work over time. In June of 2023, I was invited to work in a printmaking workshop for an open studio, back in Mexico City. Returning for a year in Helsinki I wanted to work on a project that somehow connected my life there with my past in Mexico and there it was when I realize that working with objects that I carry and collect in different spaces, that in someway they contain the word home in them could be a good starting point, since according to Richard S.Field in his text Sentences of printed art prints layers information embodying traces of past thought and acts, they are metaphors for the way in which memory traces impose themselves on all perceptions and thought. During this moment, when I started to work in the workshop with my monotypes and think about this mechanism of collecting I have had my entire life, I started to question, why I found the process of printmaking so similar to the recollection of intangible experiences by the tangibility of the matter of objects?. While I was working on this project, different connections start to arouse between the process of printmaking and the concepts that I used to create the code which I will explain in the next pages of this thesis. This concepts started to link with my perception of memory and the traditional concepts that are inside of the process of printmaking. Through this practice based thesis I have been trying to answer the following question: What does thinking printmaking ‘archeologically’ as a contemporary art practice mean, and how can such an archaeological inclination to the art of the print contribute to understandings of memory and history?.