'THE PERIPATETIC SCHOOL: ITINERANT DRAWING FROM LATIN AMERICA' CURATED BY TANYA BARSON AT THE DRAWING ROOM

'The Peripatetic School' exhibition view






Mateo Lopez, Nowhere Man, drawings installation, 2011



Brigida Baltar, Forest Flora, earth drawings on paper, 2008



Ishmael Randall Weeks, Fragments, installation, 2011





Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Carbon Copy Drawings from the Amazonian Library in Iquitos, 2011


Jorge Macchi, Missing Points, 2007, cut out map of the world



Andre Komatsu, Constructing Worlds, entropic drawings, 2010




Nicolas Paris, Hurry Slowly, 2007-ongoing, found objects which detonate ideas for drawings



Tony Cruz, Building, digital animations, 2007





Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Abstract, 2011, slideshow made of drawings found at the Amazonic Library in Iquitos

Brigida Baltar, drawing

Brigida Baltar, Untitled, brick dust drawing, 2008


Tony Cruz, Distance Drawing San Juan/London, an attempt to draw the distance from San Juan to London, 2011


Brigida Baltar, Tony Cruz


The Drawing Room's new space in Bermondsey


Christian Rattemeyer giving a talk at the Drawing Room

The Peripatetic School [Gr. peripatein – to walk about]
Itinerant drawing practices from Latin America
Curated by Tanya Barson
with Brigida Baltar, Jose Tony Cruz, Andre Komatsu, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Nicolas Paris, Ishmael Randall Weeks
22 September - 12 November 2011

The relationship between exploration and inquiry, or moresimply between walking and reflection, is one we can all appreciate (a commonclaim being that our best thinking is done on the move). It has a long pedigree,going back to the school of philosophy founded by Aristotle in ancient Greece,which was rooted in the practice of empirical observation and knowledge drawnfrom experience. The term ‘Peripatetic’ is derived from the ancient Greek term for‘of walking’ or ‘given to walking about’, it is used to mean itinerant, wandering, meandering, or walking.While the school is said to have been named after the peripatoi (colonnades) ofthe Lyceum (chosen as a meeting place since – as a non-citizen of Athens –Aristotle could not own property), it is also claimed that it was because ofAristotle’s habit of walking while lecturing. Thus, peripatetic is also used todescribe itinerant teachers.

In pre-Columbian South America, the Inca road system, orQhapaq Ñan, was the most extensive and highly advanced for its time; 10,000miles of exceptional, all-weather construction that acted as a system ofcommunication, a source of stability, a sign of Imperial authority and a methodof delineating internal boundaries. “The roads were not only used to separatepeople but ‘for thinking, by helping to conceive of the relationship of one toanother’.” However, as the Incas didnot use the wheel for transportation, and did not have horses, the trails wereused almost exclusively by people walking.

Of course, the history of LatinAmerica is littered with exemplars of the epic voyages of conquest, explorationand rites of passage. From the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro whodefeated the Incan empire and began the brutal suppression of indigenous culture,to the German explorer and scientist Friedrich von Humboldt who travelled inCentral and South America between 1799 and 1804 and who wrote extensively onits natural history and geography. Similarly, the motorcycle journey taken byErnesto ‘Che’ Guevara in the early 1950s, that began as a coming of age, butbecame the road to revolutionary politics. In literature and art, there areequally important examples; the writing of Jorge Luis Borges whose partlysurreal, partly existential literature takes as its central inspiration andsubject the city of Buenos Aires, or the work of pioneering video artist JuanDowney, whose Video Trans-America project set out to document the continent –both North and South - during the early 1970s.

This group of artists from acrossLatin America share an engagement with the landscape, whether urban or rural. Morespecifically, they are concerned with travelling or moving through thelandscape, and frequently with walking, which is combined in their work withdiverse approaches to drawing. Images that are the result of itinerancy ornomadism, places, scenes and things observed along the way, abound. They journeyout of the studio, into the neighbourhood, the city, the territory or entirecontinent beyond, in a manner that evokes by turns Surrealist, Borgesian orSituationist metropolitan perambulation, or exploration in wilderness spaces(whether jungle, mountain, desert or pampas). The artist is often seen as asolitary figure, a strolling flaneur or otherwise a lone traveller who venturesfurther afield (predecessors from Casper David Friedrich and Frederick Churchto Richard Long and Francis Alys come to mind). Thus, while these artists sharea sense of the subjective experience of landscape, it results in a diverse rangeof concerns and responses. Through their work they raise questions aboutownership and access to territory and its resources, about borders and systemsof control, and the political and economic struggles that stem from these. The povertyand contingencies of life within some Latin American communities are alsoexpressed (behind the work are the facts of a continent impacted on bypolarised politics, instability and corruption, the failure of utopian Modernistdevelopmentalism, a lack of amenities or access to utilities that are elsewheretaken for granted and where natural disasters such as earthquakes can alsocause chaos and devastation). Some express a fascination with the flora, fauna,topography and natural riches, while also testifying to the tensions betweennature and culture. Several seem to manifest a sense of ‘topophilia’ and anobsession with maps and cartographies – but often seeking to undermine theirrationalist purpose. Others look for the bizarre in the everyday, while alsocataloguing aspects of the lived culture of the continent – aspects of lifethat are overlooked by guidebooks and don’t conform to the picturesque orstereotypical. Their work utilizes models and conventions from geographical,botanical, topographical, political and philosophical or surrealistinvestigation. The individual bodies of work destabilise assumptions about thecontinent. They present instead individual testaments to the extraordinaryheterogeneity of its people, culture, languages, cities and landscape.

These artists address the actions taken by man in the world,his passage through the landscape and impact upon it. Often, they themselvesconduct journeys or undertake residencies as a form of aesthetic nomadism. [AsNicholas Bourriard has argued, nomadism is one of the defining characteristicsof a post-post-modernist era or ‘alter-modernity’.] Symptomatic of this itineranttendency is their frequent recourse to drawing. Drawing has always been themost portable medium, the fundamental exploratory tool to which the artistreturns time and again. However, for these artists, drawing has become a focusof expanded practices that engage with the landscape and culture as a subjectand source for exploration, as well as philosophical speculation. Not only dothey explore the world at large, but simultaneously the parameters of drawingitself, often using unconventional materials or strategies. These artists seekto blur the traditional boundaries between media categorisations; work on paperbecomes sculptural object and simple line drawing becomes video animation.Drawing travels off the page and into the environment itself.

Tanya Barson, 2011

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Co-publication with Ridinghouse. Edited by Tanya Barson and Kate Macfarlane, it will include essays by Moacir dos Anjos, Tanya Barson, Pablo Léon de la Barra & Isobel Whitelegg and colour plates of works in the exhibition.

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