Patricia Esquivias
Caracas, Venezuela, 1979
Walking Still, 2014
Video (colour and audio) and graphite frottages on paper
5’72’’ and 2 elements of 100 x 70 cm ea.
Edition 1/5
Acquired 2018

Patricia Esquivias builds her stories from memory, anecdotes and information related to a subject matter she has researched extensively. She then elaborates a narrative, and stages herself reading or humming (as is the case in this work) while the camera points to the screen of her computer, which features texts, and either still or moving images. There is a performative quality to this undertaking: improvisation—and the resulting mishaps this may imply—is an essential part of this process, as it further stresses the notion of an individual, subjective viewpoint.

Walking Still consists of a video lecture in which the artist focuses on the sidewalks of a small town in Colombia where she travelled during the course of her grant. She was particularly interested in deciphering the effect of colonialism on culture, using the decorative patterns she found on the sidewalks, and relating them to stuccoes she had encountered in Madrid as well as in Morocco, where this technique seems to originate. This somewhat virtual experience is balanced by the physical presence of two frottage drawings the artist executed from two stuccoes she encountered in Madrid in the course of her research.