R e b e c c a
J a n s s o n
To encounter the horizon
Rebecca Jansson, 2023
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Line Editor: Jaclyn Arndt
The Story of the Lost Colombian Bird
A few years ago, in 2017 to be precise, I made a new friend—Alejandra—an artist from Bogotá, Colombia. Our paths crossed by chance in Stockholm that autumn. I was invited to the artist-led Supermarket Art Fair to collaborate with a group of other artists at the fair.1
Alejandra did not attend the Supermarket Art Fair, but one of her artworks was there. Exhibited in a gallery representing South American artists was a small, portable sky that contained small laminated graphite drawings with tiny, tiny stars set amid the graphite blacking.2 The stars were only visible when you held the small drawings up to the bright ceiling lamps. They were part of a work based on the fictional notebook of an astronomer named Julio Garavito Armero. In the note- book was a description of the architecture of an astronomical observatory, and the small graphite drawings with the stars were part of the astronomer’s fictional studies of the night sky. I was deeply enchanted by her work, a fact that did not escape the gallerist, who proceeded to put me in touch with Alejandra —which led to Alejandra and I becoming digital pen pals.
At that time, in late 2017, Alejandra and I had many conversations about distance in our email correspondence. We were both fascinated by the physical distance between us—the entire ocean between our two bodies. Parallel to this, the idea to collaborate emerged, using our physical distance as a guiding con- cept for the development of a joint project. Through our letters, we decided that each of us would select and send a small object to the other by post. The two objects would thus travel the entire physical distance between us— something neither of us had the opportunity to do ourselves. It also felt important for there to be a reason behind our object choices. The object should be something that we hadn’t been able to get out of our minds lately. A question we were not inclined to resolve or continue to work on alone.
I sent Alejandra a small stone with great potential-by-association to become a mountain along with a handwritten letter. Alejandra sent me a small stamp featuring the image of a Colombian bird, which she’d placed inside a white envelope. The bird had lingered undisturbed in her wallet for several years, forgotten, and her idea was to allow the little bird one last flight. As a way of rousing it from slumber. Unfortunately, the bird never arrived.
29 November 2017
"Dearest Rebecca,
I really love the way our conversations emerge, as an echo of the geographical distance between us (do you believe distance is something that exists in between?). There are many different kinds of distances any way.
I have to tell you that I am more than embarrassed about the mail correspondence. In these three months I went a bunch of times to the post office to ask for what had happened and each time they gave me a different excuse. You’ll see, here in Colombia we have the national post office (the one I used) and many other private companies (most of them foreign and really ex- pensive). Now I gave up on them, but absolutely not on our collaboration.
I believe the bird I sent you never arrived to its destination and never will. As it will remain lost in its way to you, I would like to write these words describing it from my memory. The envelope was white, and it had a blue card in it, with few words, (those I do not remember). Attached
to it, was a little stamp with a colombian bird. I believe the bird was green and had a few parts painted in yellow and blue. I do not remember the name of the bird, but I would like to tell you that in Spanish we have two words to refer to this animal: AVE y PÁJARO, (the second one I like the most). I bought this stamp once at the flee market several years ago, and put it in my wallet. I forgot it till the day I was thinking what would be the perfect thing to send you. I really
liked the idea of this old static bird having a new flight, migrating to colder places, watching different landscapes, to meet a new friend. Also I think it was beautiful to take this antique technology, the stamp, which is supposed to be on the outside of the envelope, and save it inside as a treasure. But well ...
Ale."3
Becoming bird, 2023. Pencil on paper, painted MDF, variable dimensions (drawing: 36 × 16,5 cm). Detail
A Small Shard Can Grow into a Whole Life
It took a while for the greater significance of this experience to sink in. Several years after the bird went missing, I began working with this incident as an art project in and of itself. A person can be involved in something that, on the surface, is quite ordinary. It may not sound particularly remarkable when talked about, but nonetheless it can awaken, or unleash, and deepen something that this person can’t help but ponder. In my case, the story of the lost bird can be seen as one such incident.
One way to view this incident is as a kind of encyclopedia entry. A letter was lost in
the mail—which means that somewhere along the line the postal service failed in its task
of delivering a letter from sender to recipient. Perhaps the letter disappeared, was stolen,
or is simply wedged behind a wastebasket in a post office in Bogotá, forgotten. This idea of the missing letter, and where it might have gone, is certainly compelling to me. The incident itself could speak to issues around several interesting topics from, for instance, a political or societal perspective, since it directly relates to a country’s ability to have a functioning postal service. But choosing to focus on the idea of the bird itself, as depicted on the stamp, and thinking about the journey it would have made, and perhaps had already embarked upon, and really getting into
how this feels makes the experience shifts.
I’m curious about this experience. There is something about this experience, and the incident, that reaches far beyond an encyclopedia entry. Perhaps my sense of wonder about the incident of the lost bird is simply about having an essential sense of wonder at the world, which can be too readily forgotten in modernity. As for me, the importance of cap- turing these experiences feels like a fundamental part of being an artist. What can otherwise easily disappear, or go by unnoticed, is given space to be noticed and seen.
The Russian author and literary critic Viktor Shklovsky writes about what he calls “automated perception” and the risks of living life on an automated plane. He believes that what has be- come habitual eventually also becomes automated.4 As such, phenomena pass us by as if they are veiled. We simply don’t notice them, and so habituation to the outside world dulls us and takes away our ability to feel wonder. Shklovsky writes: “And so life is reckoned as nothing. ... If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”5 In other words, auto- mated perception closes up our souls and turns us into robots. Personally, I try not to notice my surroundings in too a habitual way. My focus is always on taking in new details, as well as consciously using what I have cultivated as my artistic eye, where the very noticing of details is key. Shklovsky’s remedy for a life lived on an automated plane is, in fact, art.6
One writer I come to think of with regard to raising one’s level of consciousness and paying attention to the details of everyday life is the French writer Patrick Modiano. Right at the start of my art project on the lost Colombian bird, my friend Mattias gave me a gift: a copy
of Modiano’s book Dora Bruder,7 which he’d spotted at a flea market and bought for me. Modiano’s book revolves around a small newspaper advertisement he found in an old daily newspaper from 1941. He discovered the advertisement roughly fifty years after the newspaper was printed, in the 1990s. The ad is short, with scant information about a young girl who went missing in Paris.
The only information the ad contains is the girl’s name (Dora Bruder), a brief description of her at the time of disappearance, and her parents’ address. Even so, Modiano could not let go of the ad. Taking these short lines as his starting point, he began a long and intensive search for Bruder’s history; the search went on for several years. This man is who the reader accompanies throughout the course of the book. One can follow Modiano as he walks the streets of Paris, the same streets Bruder walked. And you get to follow his thoughts about where she actually went after her disappearance. What is then revealed is a story about the German occupation of Paris, as well as a story about a Jewish family during the Holocaust. And, suddenly, far greater depths in the story are revealed.
Ever-present in the book is Modiano’s attention as well as the search based on that minor incident of finding the ad. It is easy
to understand the importance of allowing yourself to be consumed—and not to mention, be amazed—by something that is otherwise easy to overlook. Not least in this particular case, where such an important history sprung from the search itself. Mattias was drawing
a clear comparison between his own artistic practice, as well as mine, and Modiano’s writing. On the very first page of the book, Mattias handwrote a small note to me that sums
this up beautifully: “A small shard can grow into a whole life.”8
Were we birds / Var vi fåglar, 2023. Installation view, MFA exhibition, KHM1 Gallery, Malmö, 2023
Experiencing the World to Understand the World
In recent years, my focus as an artist has mainly been on drawing—almost exclusively pencil drawing—as a means of expression. I would like to talk about the experience of drawing, because I find it to be so important to what I, as an artist, feel is relevant for me to discuss. I also want to connect my thinking on drawing to my work with the lost Colombian bird.
To go deeper into my explanation of the experience of drawing, as well as the nature
of drawing, I look to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his essay “Eye and Mind.”9 In this essay, Merleau-Ponty discusses experience from a phenomenological perspective. That is, the explanation of experience as it is lived. In the essay he mainly references painting, which is also relevant to me as an artist who primarily works on paper with pencil, as painting and drawing have much in common. But since I’m an artist
who draws, the main focus of my discussion here will be on drawing, and I will simply replace “painting” with “drawing” as I consider Merleau-Ponty’s essay.
To offer a little more background and context for Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, I want to go into what he writes at the very beginning of his essay. He writes that science, something we normally think of as knowledge—that is, something that tells or reveals the truth about the nature of reality—does in fact manipulate things, and does not inhabit reality. What he means is that science has taken a step outside reality, viewing the world from above, and thus viewing reality as an object. He argues that science simply does not engage with the experience of reality.10
Experience, according to Merleau-Ponty, is important when trying to understand the world. And to understand why experience is so important for that understanding, and how it is linked to art, I would like to introduce another French philosopher: Jacques Derrida. In his essay “Signature
Event Context,”11 he discusses writing in relation to “self-presence.” It’s not uncommon for humans to believe that we are fully self-aware. We often imagine this self-awareness
to be the source of the meaning we are then able to express in speech and writing. That
is, with the help of language. According to this line of thinking, meaning comes before language. What Derrida argues, however, is that it actually works the other way around. In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida wants to demonstrate that writing is what gives meaning to our experience.12 One could say that the reality is that, rather than being fully self-aware or having an understanding of ourselves, we are in fact mostly a mystery to ourselves, and we actually conceive of our reality in terms of a question rather than an answer.
Derrida’s perspective—that we do not necessarily have clear and defined access
to ourselves as subjects or souls, or whatever you choose to call it—can be understood
as a process of trying to find out who we are. This is something that we can achieve with language, or writing. To follow this line of thinking is to see writing as something that produces answers to the question of who we are.
You can choose to see language, or writing, as a set of terms we use to understand things about ourselves and the world around. So when we try to understand ourselves, we are relying on the same language and the same words that everyone else is using to understand themselves and others. We all use the same set of terms to understand the world, as well as to communicate with and understand each other. To make it even clearer, you could say that we use a common system—language —and this also implies that we exist in a shared world.
Following Derrida’s thinking on writing in relation to self-presence, we are then enigmas
to ourselves in the world, which we then try to get closer to through writing. When it comes to Derrida’s thinking about language, one can identify a distinction between what can be called the “inscription” and the “inscribing”—what is written versus the act of writing. This is important because this line of thought can be used to better understand Merleau-Ponty and his way of describing art. Think of it as replacing the idea of writing with the idea of art, or even drawing: as what is drawn and the act of drawing.
To Look at a Drawing Is to Be Offered a World
Merleau-Ponty wants us to look at the world through our lived experience.13 He wants us to step away from familiar and habitual concepts, which come from the scientific way of looking at the world, in an attempt to gain a truer understanding of reality. This means turning a fresh eye on reality—how things are—before language, categorisation, and objectification come into play and influence our view of the world. Merleau-Ponty also claims that we experience the world through lived experience, through our bodies.14 That is to say, he draws attention to the fundamental fact that we appear in the world as bodies.
He further argues that the artist can look at the world without judging it.15 The artist— and specifically the painter, in Merleau-Ponty’s view—looks at the world with fresh eyes. Using an artistic gaze when looking at the world can be seen as a way of approaching an understanding of reality, instead of our habitual way of seeing the world. Instead of seeing the world through how it is already marked, the inscription, as I mentioned in relation to Derrida, we can think of the
world in terms of the moment of inscribing.
This is why I want to delve a little deeper into drawing as a medium, which in several ways is similar to painting in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. I simply want to consider what it is that distinguishes drawing from other artistic mediums. If you compare drawing to sculpture, for example, which is about physical forms— objects or an object in a room—that you can relate to and often have the opportunity to walk around with your own physical body, then we can say that drawing, in this sense, is not that. A drawing exists as a two-dimensional surface, often on a sheet of paper with, for example, graphite pigment on top, and the world exists inside this surface. To look at a drawing is to be offered, or to receive, a world. You are offered a world with objects and surfaces, just like in sculpture; but, unlike sculpture, the world of the drawing exists inside a two-dimensional surface where objects are quite simply excluded. At this point, I find it interesting to reflect on this particular definition of drawing. Of course, artists have a mandate to go against definition —which is something I’m constantly explor- ing in my work in drawing-as-medium. How- ever, I’m simply curious to see if it is possible to break through the confines of the world of drawing and make it more like the medium of sculpture.
I am certainly not alone in wanting to rupture pre-existing definitions and examine what that means in my artistic practice. Even when it comes to this specific delineation—that is, examining drawing as we know it, as a twodimensional medium—I can cite many other artists who have done the same. One I was inspired by several years ago is the Swedish artist Vanna Bowles. She often works with pencil drawings in various constellations and presents these together with three-dimensional elements that refer back to the drawn images. Animals recur in her work as a kind of fable, putting them into delicate, human situations. Bowles continually returns to one very special bird: the African grey parrot, one of the world’s most intelligent birds, which also has a knack for mimicking human speech. I saw an exhibi- tion by Bowles in Gothenburg a few years
ago,16 when I was attending a preparatory art school. What struck me about her work was how she shifts between the two dimensional and the three dimensional. Bowles profoundly influenced my understanding of where I wanted to go as an artist in terms of my personal approach to drawing.
Drawing as an Exploration of Seeing
Phenomenology tells us to go back to looking at experience.17 Taking up this perspective makes me want to deepen my understanding of what happens with seeing in relation to drawing. Seeing is, after all, one way for the body to perceive and experience the world. Sight also differs somewhat from most other senses, as it brings you something from a distance. Whereas touch, taste, and smell could be said, in a different way, to be dependent on proximity. You have to put something in your mouth, on your tongue, to taste it. In the same way, you need to touch something with a part of your body, such as your hand, to experience how touching that thing feels. Perhaps one could argue that smell can occur at a certain distance, but not quite in the same way as both seeing and hearing. Seeing and hearing can each give us something from
a greater distance. We have the ability to hear cars on the street through an open window, even if we are several floors up in a high-rise. Similarly, we have the ability to look to the horizon or up at the clouds in the sky from this same high-rise, and the world appears in- finite to us through our eyes. What an incredible experience, really—to have reality materialise like this before our eyes. All we need are the eyes in our bodies to experience the visual aspect of reality.
It is this precise focus on the use of my eyes that I experience when drawing. I feel that my eyes have become sharper over the years of my drawing practice. I see things now that I previously could not. My way of drawing is based on working from existing originals and simply translating or copying them through drawing. I use my eyes to seek out these originals, and then I use my eyes, and my hand, to translate them into pencil drawings. When I look for the originals, I’m employing a specific type of seeing and something that could be described as a form of desire. I want an image to rouse an emotion in me, and once this has happened, my seeing shifts, and I then regard the image with what could be called a “cold eye.” This means that I look at my found images with a more non-evaluative or mechanical eye, a bit like how a lens looks at an image. By doing this, I’m simply trying to perceive the image as neutrally as possible so as to be able to copy it with as much fidelity to the original as possible. However, I might also switch between these different ways of seeing, even during the act of drawing. I do this to give myself the freedom to evaluate what I’m seeing and to make deci- sions about the image accordingly—for example, omitting certain parts of the image plane or enhancing other parts. This creates dynamism, and it becomes more interesting for me when I am able to switch between perspectives, de- pending on what I want to say with the drawing. The originals I work with, often old photographs, usually come from old books that I purchase at flea markets. It becomes a kind
of constraint to use my eyes to search through a limited selection of sources in this way. But here I want to focus on my experience of seeing specifically in relation to the act of drawing, after the originals have been found.
I was once told that my eyes work like a scanner, meaning that I look at an image and then recreate the same image moving from one corner of the page to the opposite corner—much like how a scanner works. I find this analogy intriguing, especially in relation to the cold eye. This analogy feels like a fairly accurate description of how I experi- ence my gaze and hand moving across the paper as I draw. I want to think further on this relationship between the eyes and the hand when it comes to drawing.
The relationship between sight and movement is something Merleau-Ponty goes into more deeply in “Eye and Mind.”18 You could say that to experience yourself as a body in the world is to experience yourself in relation to the events happening around you—events with which you engage and in which your body is used. It could be something as mundane as seeing your bus coming down the road, so you start running towards it so as to catch it in time, before it drives on. It could also be someone throwing a ball at you, which you see, and so your arm shoots into the air and catches the ball. Events happen around us all the time, and you could say that we experience our body through our ability, or inability, to do things related to these events. You may have the ability to run for the bus or raise your arm to catch the ball. But you might not be able to fit your body into a tight space.
Merleau-Ponty argues that vision and movement should not be seen as two separate acts when it comes to our experience of an event.19 This means that in the example of the ball being thrown to you, vision (when you see the ball coming towards you) and movement (when your arm lifts to catch the ball) are one and the same act. The experience of this event does not take place in two separate parts, with vision as one part and movement as the other, but rather we experience vision and movement as if they are one and the same act. You see the ball, and without stopping to acknowledge that you have seen it and then deciding to raise your arm and catch it, you just do it. It’s as if your arm shoots into the air because you saw the ball. Similarly, in the bus example, you could say that when you see the bus coming down the street, it’s as if it sets your legs in motion. You don’t have to tell your legs to run: it just happens when you see the bus. In other words, the experience does not have different stages—one visual and one motion based. Instead, perception is simultaneously visual and kinetic. We experience it as an act and an experience.
I experience vision (when I look at a picture that I am going to draw) and movement (when my hand moves the pencil across the paper and draws the picture) as one and the same experience. And it’s a special experience: a kind of interplay between eye and hand as part of my understanding of what I see. My eyes register the image before me, but the movements of my hand and pencil across the paper also cause me to feel the image on a deeper level. I experience that I see it more clearly. Thinking of the eyes as a scanner also suggests careful attention to detail. This is also important to my practice, which makes the analogy between the scanner and me almost comically apt. Of course, if you placed the originals
and my drawings side by side and studied them carefully, tiny, tiny differences between them would become apparent. Such differences are present in all drawings, and sometimes they are even the result of a deliberate choice, to clarify certain details in a picture, for instance. But it’s the attention to detail that I find interesting here. Not the extent to which the picture is an exact copy of its original.
The American artist Vija Celmins has had a big influence on my artistic practice, including my drawing. Our ways of drawing have some- thing in common, which is why I’m also oftencompared to her. She made a name for herself by drawing starry skies, oceans with no horizon, and spider webs. There is something repetitive and methodical in Celmins’s way of working, both in how she executes the drawings and her choice of motifs. In an interview, she mentioned that her interest in spider webs as a motif stems from the thought of the spiders that wove them. She likens herself to the spider, which I think is a beautiful comparison. She says: “Maybe I identify with the spider. I’m the kind of person who works on something for- ever and then works on the same image again the next day.”20 Thinking of the slow pencil drawing that we both engage in, this analogy really resonates with me.
On Longing, 2023. Pencil on paper, painted MDF, glass, paint on wall, variable dimensions (drawing: 21 × 32 cm). Detail
Speaking of analogies, Celmins also mentions the scanner when she talks about the gaze in relation to drawing. In another interview, she described the human eye as the ultimate scanner.21 Isn’t this image of the artist’s gaze compelling? Especially because it can be interpreted as the artist using the image to see and to gain an understanding of what things in
the world actually look like. However, there is a crucial difference between the human eye and the eye of the scanner. A scanner has only one eye, whereas we humans have two. That is to say, our perception is deeper and more complex than a scanner’s. A scanner’s vision is only on the surface, meaning what it perceives is the actual impression upon a sheet of paper, if, for example, it’s looking at an image. Thus, for the scanner vision means being an image reader; it can’t perceive space like a human can. I want to leave this idea of two-dimensional vision hanging for now, as later on I will go into more detail about vision in relation to spatiality and working three-dimensionally.
But regarding these thoughts about seeing, I also find it interesting to think about drawing with respect to blindness. That is, the inability to see. I’ll return to Derrida for a moment, and his essay Memoirs of the Blind.22 He wrote the essay as a catalogue for an art exhibition of the same name at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1990, which revolved around drawings. In the essay, Derrida talks about seeing and blindness, using the drawings included in the exhibition as a starting point.
What struck me as I read Derrida’s essay was how he describes drawing using blindness. Because even though I would describe my experience of drawing as producing a kind of super-vision in me, it’s interesting to challenge the idea by considering that it could also produce blindness in artists like me, who primarily draw. One example Derrida offers of blindness in drawing is when you sit with a blank piece of paper, put your hand on the paper, hover your pencil above the page, and then draw the very first line.23 Where do you place the pencil? This situation is about the search for a place to put what you are about to draw. Derrida suggests that here we are faced with blindness.24 We cannot tell from the paper where to put the pencil; this action takes place in blindness, because there is nothing on the paper to guide us. Compare this to tracing, a technique I use sometimes, where a sheet of paper is placed on a light box or against a window, so as to copy the original beneath the blank sheet. In this case, when the original image shines through the pa- per, there are clear lines and shapes to guide you. But in the situation with the blank sheet of paper that Derrida describes, he argues that we are faced with blindness. He compares it to drawing in the dark.
According to Derrida, one does not need to see in order to draw (Swedish: teckna) or signify (Swedish: beteckna).25 According to him, seeing is secondary to drawing. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Derrida argues that experience does not pass through our sensory impressions to our consciousness, meaning that experience does not come first; instead, experience takes a detour
via drawing or writing. Expression comes before impression, according to Derrida.26 So it is
the drawing, and the writing, that gives meaning to an experience. This is why he talks about blindness in relation to drawing—and this is the point where I’d like to go deeper regarding my own experience of drawing.
Derrida’s thoughts on blindness in relation to drawing are especially interesting to me when I consider how I experience drawing. I mentioned earlier that I draw my pictures based on originals that I’ve found in books and magazines on the second-hand market. I want to delve into the placement of my drawings, on the paper itself but also in space, using Derrida’s thoughts on blindness as a backdrop. When I find an image that I want to draw, I’m faced with a series of decisions. One such decision is the scale at which to draw the image. Often I retain the original image’s scale, but on some occasions I want to expand or shrink the size. The reason for this simply comes down to what I hope to achieve and what I want the image to express or clarify. Another important decision is about the precise format of the paper, as well as where on the paper I should place the drawing. This image placement is exciting for me to think about and work with. I take an active role in the placement of the image on the paper and the relationship of the drawing to the whiteness or emptiness of the paper. The location of the image on the sheet of paper can indicate the direction in which I want the drawing to be read. So, in my images, I often make equal use of negative space (the blank white paper) and the drawn surface.
By way of example, I’ll describe a piece I exhibited in at Malmö Art Academy’s Annual Exhibition in 2022: Om du tittar noga (If You Look Carefully) (2022).27 The work consists of eight small-scale pencil drawings, each drawn on a sheet of white paper of various sizes. These are presented alongside a mixture of small-scale objects such as rocks, crooked sticks, and short, sharpened pencils. The piece also includes a poetry collection I found titled Öppna er, ögon (Open, eyes) by the Erik Blomberg.28 Most of the drawings are displayed in white-painted box frames, which in turn hang on white-painted MDF boards mounted to the walls of the exhibition space. The MDF boards are sawn into different sizes—similar to the white paper the pencil drawings are drawn on, but much larger. Together, they create a relief-like drawing installation, which span the walls of the exhibition space, inviting the viewer to look closely at every detail in order to discover similarities and connections between all the various parts on display.
This work, the drawing installation, feels like a good example for exploring the impor- tance of placement. While I was working on this particular piece, I felt that I was faced with three different steps, or three different situations, where placement became important. First of all, I was faced with where to draw the images on the various sheets of paper. Each small drawing presented me with a series of decisions, including the one outlined by Derrida: Where would I put pencil to paper to make the very first line?
As I mentioned, Derrida argues that in this situation we are faced with a sort of blindness.29 I would liken this situation—the moment pencil is put to paper—to other similar situations that have become apparent to me through my process. The second situation I faced was the question of where to place the finished drawing within the frame. And the third concerned the installation of the piece as a whole in the exhibition space. That is, where I would place all the framed drawings, as well as the MDF boards and objects, on the white walls. You could say that it was about the drawing on the paper, the drawing in the frame, and finally the drawing in the space. All these steps are similar in terms of how I relate to thoughts on placement.
When I think about the importance of placement, I think about my own experience of the act of drawing. One of the drawings included in Om du tittar noga is a small drawing in portrait format on a piece of paper 23 x 8.5 cm. The drawing itself (that is, the actual drawn surface of the paper) is square and a modest 8.5 x 8.5 cm. I placed the square drawn image at the top of the paper, leaving the lower part of the paper blank. I did this be- cause the image is of two hands about to punch a hole into a piece of leather using a hammer and a punch. The trajectory of the hammer in the image space is clearly downward, and the hole punch that one hand holds to the leather forms a straight vertical line—a motion I could clearly feel the power of when I thought about the blunt force of the hammer striking the punch’s top. To enhance the particular sensation of the hammer strike, I chose to cut a vertical line into the blank part of the paper, below the drawn image, in line with and the same thickness as the hole punch. In other words, I extended the line made by the hole punch in the image, and extended the movement that would result from the force of the hammer hitting the punch. In this way, the blank part of the paper takes on as much, or even more, importance in terms of how I want the image to be read.
Even after I’ve drawn an image on paper, the drawing is rarely complete. Often the spatial installation is needed to bring the drawing to life and create its actual meaning. In the case of the drawing of the hands, the hammer, and the hole punch, I chose to place the work high up in the exhibition space, so that the line of the drawing with the hole punch and the cutout was overhead and in line with a large crack on one wall. It was as if the little drawing of the hammer and punch had with great force —like the latent force within a large building that can cause the building to move and thus fissure—made this wall crack and crackled its paint.
For me, white walls are just like white paper, and this is also how I relate to them and the space at large. When I place a drawing on a wall, it’s the same as placing the drawing on the sheet of paper. So, when I treat the space like a sheet of paper, it’s only the scale that changes. In other words, my experience is that I draw in the room with my drawings just like how I draw the image on the paper. This is important to consider in relation to how I like to move between two-dimensional and three-dimensional seeing, as I mentioned earlier.
Derrida’s assertion that we are faced with blindness when it comes to drawing, and in the very situation when we are about to start drawing, which has to do with the placement of the pencil on the paper, is interesting in connection with my own experience of drawing. Especially since my experience of placing a drawing extends beyond the moment the pencil touches the paper’s surface. For Derrida, the understanding of what we want to express comes only after we have made the drawing, and that is why he talks about blindness in relation to drawing. I think this understanding can be further explained by seeing drawing as an impression that carries meaning, similar to writing.
Border, 2023. Pencil on paper, paint on pillar, variable dimensions (drawing: 14,2 × 21 cm)
Drawing as an Impression with Meaning
Like Derrida, I’m interested in the impression. I’m interested in both writing and drawing, both of which are foregrounded in my work on the lost Colombian bird. I’m interested in the similarities between drawing and writing, and I want to go deeper into those similarities by thinking of both drawing and writing as impressions.
First, I want to explore the relationship between spoken and written language, and chiefly perhaps the differences between the two modes of communication, based on Derrida’s thinking. This is to understand more clearly how the written word actually functions in interpersonal communication and how we think about written language, in order to compare it with drawing. Usually we think of both spoken and written language as a way for us to take thoughts or images from our consciousness and pass them on to someone else’s consciousness. It can be seen as a way of sharing our perspective with someone else. However, some aspects of written language are not present in spoken language, and vice versa. One clear difference relates to presence.
When speaking, and thus communicating, with another person, the sender and the receiver must have a certain presence between them in order for them to be able to talk. To talk to another person, both people need to be present in the here and now. Writing, on the other hand, has a different ability: it can expand language in terms of time and space. We can write a letter to someone today, which can be read by them tomorrow. We can also write a letter to a person in a faraway place. Such as Bogotá.
However, sometimes even spoken language has the ability to expand language in time and space. Perhaps there has been a shift, here, in how we are able to view spoken language today as compared to the era when Derrida put his thoughts down on paper. This, I would argue, has to do with digitisation. Today, we have the opportunity to communicate with another person via speech without them having to be in our here and now, like used to be required. By making voice recordings, or even video recordings with both audio and moving images, we can make the spoken word go farther than we physically can. If you record audio of your- self speaking and then upload that audio clip online, another person can listen to what you want to communicate tomorrow or a year from now. You can also reach a person on the other side of the world with what you have to say. This technology creates a kind of shift in the nature of spoken language, bringing it closer to written language in terms of presence and absence. Regardless, it can be equally interesting to follow Derrida’s thoughts on the nature of written language and what it is that distinguishes it, in most cases, from spoken language.
I now want to go into how we read written language, and how we read meaning in written language. A key characteristic of written language is that what is written is a thing that can also be read. What is written, and the meaning of what is written, can also be read by anyone (who can read, of course). So it is not only the person to whom the writing is dedicated or the person who wrote it who can read and so understand the meaning of the writing. For instance, if you were to find a random written letter, missing both sender and recipient, you would still be able to read the letter and understand its content and meaning.
According to Derrida, writing “says what it says” even in the complete absence of both sender and receiver.30 Thus, the meaning borne by the written word is not defined by
the writer. One could say that while we humans use language, language does not need us. The meaning is there nonetheless. When one person writes a letter to another person—be it a love letter from ancient Greece or a letter to a friend in another country in the fall of 2017—it’s not the fact that a specific person wrote the letter that gives the letter its meaning. It’s rather that the person who wrote it formu- lated and disseminated a kind of meaning made available to them by language. In other words, writing that particular letter is a version of the meaning that appears in that particular letter. The meaning could just as easily have been expressed in another way.
To use a different example: If you were to write a letter to another person—your mother, for instance—to tell her how much she means to you, you might, at some point after the letter was written, read it again and find that it contains a meaning other than what you intended at the time of writing. It might be something you could not discern at the time
of writing. Maybe you notice that the letter doesn’t quite express what you thought it did, but rather actually expresses anger towards your mother—but this only becomes clear in retrospect. Derrida says that writing expresses something, whether we are aware of it or not.31 It makes itself known to us after the language has been written.
I wonder if it’s possible to think about drawing similar to how Derrida thinks about and describes written language. If I go back to myself and think about my personal experience of drawing, I feel that I cannot possibly have a full understanding of the meaning of a drawing. Even if there was a will behind what I wanted to express through a drawing,
it seems naive to imagine that I would have a full understanding of the drawing’s entire content. Similarly, it seems naive to believe that I would have a full understanding of myself as I am expressing myself through drawing. To see this as the meaning revealing itself only once the drawing has been drawn is to follow Derrida’s thinking, and I find this idea interesting because the consequence of that thinking places so much importance on the impression. I can also say, from experience, that a drawing can contain many different simultaneous meanings, depending on who is looking at it and interpreting what they see. And, as an artist, I don’t feel a need to control that meaning too much either, no matter where or how that mean- ing is created. My role is not to interpret the meaning of my work for anyone else. Instead, the fact that my work has the potential to be read in different ways is something I consider to be important and positive.
In the novel Fuglane (The Birds),32 the Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas writes about the importance of the impression to communication in par-ticular. The novel’s main character, Mattis, lives with his sister in a secluded house near a forest. One day, Mattis notices that a bird, a woodcock, has set a new course right above their house, over which it flies at night. A few days later, Mattis finds footprints and prints from a bird’s beak on the ground in a ditch near the house. He sees these prints, these impressions, as targeted messages from the bird to him. Through these markings, he begins a special conversation with the bird by drawing similar prints for it on the ground in the ditch. I think this singular written language—or drawing, if you will—is such a beautiful way to describe the importance of leaving impressions for someone else to see and experience.
What about the point at which drawing turns into written language, and vice versa? How do we read a drawing versus a written text? And what is the difference between
how a drawing is drawn and how writing is written, when both are done by hand with, for instance, a pencil? As part of my work on the lost Colombian bird, I made a series of works in the winter of 2023. On white sheets of paper, I drew images that remind me of the written drawing tables that the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven started producing in the late 1960s. Darboven’s drawings consist mostly of numbers; I chose to draw letters instead. On my sheets of paper, a specific letter is drawn in pencil, over and over again, as a repetition that stretches along the white paper—as if it were written. I used one of Alejandra’s handwritten letters as a starting point and traced certain letters
of the alphabet found in it.
The letters I chose to draw are from the modern Latin alphabet, which is the most common alphabet in use in many parts of the world. The letters I chose are those that remind me of the shape of birds. In other words, you can read the markings both as the letters they are meant to represent and as drawings with the motif of flying birds. The piece is called Winged Migration (h, m, n, r, s, u, v, w, z) (2023).33
Darboven’s relationship with the written word interests me. For several years, she explored the language of mathematics through numbers drawn in tables on sheets of paper. For her, mathematical language represented a neutral language,34 but it was also a language she used to mark time gone by, which I want to dwell on for a moment. In Ein Jahrhundert (A Century)
(1970–71),35 she uses numbers to represent the time span of a whole century. The work consists of 402 binders lined up in a large bookcase, as well as fourteen framed A3 sheets of paper and eighty-six framed A4 sheets hanging in a tight grid on the wall. The binders on
the shelf consist of sheets of paper on which Darboven has methodically drawn calendar dates according to a subjective set of rules she used to create a system. It becomes like an arithmetic language, as she assigned different numbers to dates and then added some of these numbers together to create new numbers. These binders also contain drawn systems for various calculations of the so-called value of K, which is a mathematical concept.
Darboven is an artist who, in many respects, writes time. Through the act of writing (or drawing), time is also manifested. In his Confessions, the Christian philosopher Saint Augustine writes about the difficulty of defining time: “If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.”36 The human body has no sensory organ directly connected to experiencing time. Instead, we experience time indirectly, through our ability to register a sequence of events taking place around us or by noticing changes in our en- vironment. When we experience time, we do so by registering processes. By thinking about our experience of time in this way, we can again connect with Merleau-Ponty and his theories about our experience in the world. Several events can happen around us at the same time, but the experience of these events can also
be one and the same. How does this influence our perception of time?
A work similar to Darboven’s Ein Jahrhundert (A Century) is by the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara: a two-volume book project entitled One Million Years (1999).37 Like Darboven, Kawara used numbers to describe a span of time across years—in this case, time that has been and time that has not yet taken place. Kawara’s project extends from 998,031 BC to 1,001,992 into the future—a time span of two million years.
Both Darboven and Kawara use repetition as a way to express the passage of time. By experiencing a sequence of years, we as viewers can also experience, and understand, the time represented by these numbers. This repetition interests me. By working with a form of translation, or even direct copying, a repetition of images occurs when I make a drawing
of a found photograph. Like Darboven’s and Kawara’s ways of manifesting time through writing or drawing, I also do this through my drawing. Drawing can be seen as a series of processes that take place in the making of a drawing, and through each drawn line you can also see traces of these processes. Viewers often ask me how long it takes me to draw a picture. This question is extremely difficult to answer—perhaps not least because I am uninterested in measuring time in that way, but also because it differs so much from picture to picture. Regardless of how many actual hours it takes me to draw a picture, it’s possible to see that a drawing takes a lot of time, which I find interesting. I think this is probably because we have the ability to discern the traces left behind by the process when we look at a drawing, and we can see that a human hand has worked on the surface of the paper.
In the 1970s, Darboven began to incorporate written language (i.e., language consisting of letters and words) into her drawings by using texts of authors such as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and German poet Heinrich Heine. Although Darboven is considered a visual artist, she saw herself as a writer foremost.38 In several of her artworks, she used her own handwriting to transcribe the written texts of the above-named authors. As a writer, Darboven applied her own system of composition, through which she repeated mainly numbers, but also words and phrases. According to the artist, she used numbers as language because numbers carry less meaning in com- parison to words.39
It’s fascinating to think about how a number or a letter carries a certain meaning. Like a picture of something can carry meaning. Which in turn implies that its meaning can also be discerned. It’s even more interesting to think about how different languages are actually read, and in which ways it’s also possible to use them and communicate through them. It’s also interesting to think about allowing different languages to overlap and merge by both using and reading them. Such as when the image of a bird and the letter “m” are drawn with the same line shape in pencil on a sheet of paper.
To return to the question of the actual difference between written language and drawing in terms of how the hand creates these expressions, I can honestly say that I do not have an answer. But I can go deeper into my experience of drawing itself. My experience of the hand when I draw is so close to my experience of my eyes and my vision. I described earlier that I experience a kind of interplay between hand and eyes in my understanding of what I am seeing when I draw. I experience the experience of seeing and moving the hand as one and the same experience, in line with Merleau-Ponty.40 But my hand is the part of me that is actually physically closest to what I am drawing.
When I hold a graphite pencil in my hand, it becomes part of my body—a kind of extension of my hand—and I can feel the different hardnesses and softnesses of the pencil’s tip when I press it to the paper. I have also come to recognise the weight of the different pencils as well as their different tips, when it comes to, among other things, colour, thickness, and feeling. The hard pencils (i.e., those that go from H to 9H) are light. They are a little less weighty in the hand, and I often draw much more carefully with these pencils, because the tip is so thin and hard and I want the pencil lines to melt into the paper’s soft surface. The pencils that go from B to 9B are a bit heavier and steadier in the hand. I often apply more pressure when putting these pencils to paper, to bring out that blackness of the B pencils.
Often it feels like my hand is thinking on its own, as if my brain disconnects when I draw, and I end up in a kind of meditative state where my hand feels like it is moving of its own accord. We can think of it as the hand moving, because I’m seeing the thing I’m going to draw. Just as the eyes follow what the hand draws. Also worth mentioning is that I always draw in a very small format, which also affects how my hand moves. My drawings tend to be between five and twenty centimetres long on each side, and I pay a lot of attention to detail within these small frames. My hand therefore moves in a limited area in which each tiny movement is equivalent to many miles in the worlds of these small drawings.
Each aspect that I have so far discussed is important to the question of why I chose drawing as my medium. Drawing is a language that, to me, is close to the written word. Drawing is also directly connected to thoughts, and it is a way of communicating via impressions, lines, darkness, and light on a limited, two-dimensional surface. In fact, I tend to see drawing as a way for me to think slowly and to think out loud.
The ocean has no straight lines (detail), 2023. Pencil on paper, paint on wall, variable dimensions (drawing: ca 12,5 × 13 cm)
You Can Fill a Language with Content
I mentioned that I wanted to link my thinking about drawing to my work on the lost Colombian bird. I want to do that here. I want to talk about how I specifically used drawing to create meaning based on the incident of the stamp that was lost. I want to talk about the sixteen stamps I came across about two years after the bird’s disappearance. During this period, I thought a lot about the anonymity of the little bird, given that I never got to see it before it disappeared on its way to me. All I had to go on was Alejandra’s description of the bird from memory, based on its colours. One day I came across an ad for sixteen stamps from a collector in the US. All the stamps were from Colombia, and all had the motif of small birds. I was overwhelmed because there was a chance that one of these stamps was like the one Alejandra had sent me.
I ordered the stamps from the American collector and again waited to be visited by not one, but sixteen, Colombian birds that would cross the Atlantic for me. When they reached me in Malmö a couple of weeks later, I could tell from Alejandra’s description of her bird that some of them could fit its description. But I couldn’t know for sure. The fact that Alejandra did not fully remember what the bird looked like meant that its identity could not be confirmed.
Thoughts on memory are interesting. And here, specifically: memory in relation to disappearance. I knew I wanted to talk about memory, or indeed the absence of memory—that is, oblivion. I also wanted to return to my medium—drawing—and use drawing itself as a meaning maker for a work based on these sixteen found stamps. I decided to translate all sixteen stamps into 1:1 scale pencil drawings.
The decision to draw the stamps meant that I deliberately removed all the colour from them—the only information available to help identify similarities with the bird that disappeared on its way to me. Therefore, the act of drawing is of direct importance, because this act of translation is what gives the work its meaning. This is not always the case, as my primary references are not always in colour. But in this particular case, the idea of colour in relation to grayscale was important. The work with the sixteen drawings of stamps is called I believe the bird was green with a few parts painted in yellow and blue (2022)41—the words Alejandra used to describe the bird to me. At once, each of the sixteen stamps from the collector have both the inherent possibility and impossibility of being identical to the stamp that disappeared.
In 2016, the American artist Zoe Leonard created several artworks based on photographs she found at her aunt’s house that depicted her Polish family in the years after World War II.42 Leonard then photographed the found photographs with her own camera—capturing the images not only as photographs but also as objects. I find the desire to remember
and preserve through translation fascinating. Not least because the translation itself rarely reproduces the original as it actually was. If we are to believe Derrida, it is never possible to translate something completely; a shift in meaning always occurs when you translate one thing into something else.43
To go back to memory in relation to drawing, I want to look at the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his essay “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” from 1925.44 In it, he writes about drawn impressions that arise with a specific toy called a Mystic Pad, and he uses this Mystic Pad as a metaphor to talk about memory and the unconscious. The toy’s basic function is familiar to me from my own childhood—a drawing board where it’s possible to erase what you have drawn and restore the pad to its blank state. Freud describes the structure of the toy similar to the way he imagines our perceptual apparatus. That is, how we receive impressions from the outside world, and how memories are then created and stored in us.
The Mystic Pad that Freud describes is made up of several parts that, as a whole, make it possible for the pad to be restored and used again. The pad consists of a wax slab, and on top of the wax slab is a thin transparent sheet consisting of two layers. One layer is clear celluloid and the other is wax paper. The celluloid sheet is what you write or draw on, and it is on this sheet that the impressions appear. To erase what you have drawn, you simply lift both layers off the wax slab, thus erasing the image from these outer layers. Freud suggests that our perceptual apparatus consists of two layers, like the Mystic Pad.45 He argues that we have an outer layer, called a protective shield, in place to reduce the strength of the excitations, or impressions, that we receive from the world around us. We also have an inner layer designed to receive these excitations or impressions. These layers can thus be likened to the Mystic Pad’s celluloid sheet and wax paper.
But the similarities between us and the Mystic Pad go even further. Freud argues that the way these different layers and parts of the Mystic Pad manage, or fail, to retain impressions is also similar to the way we preserve memories.46 When you restore the outer layers, erasing your drawing by lifting the layers off the wax slab, the drawing disappears. These drawings once removed and erased cannot be restored. However, the marks on the wax slab itself, which lies beneath the outer layers, leave enduring traces. Freud likens the traces on the wax slab to our unconscious.47 This is where memories are created and preserved, and this process takes place in a different location, or in a different system, than perception.
The question of memory and remembering has interested and fascinated artists, philo- sophers, and scientists since time immemorial. The subject’s enduring popularity perhaps comes as no surprise. The question of memory touches on several aspects of the human condition, something of which writers throughout the ages have also been well aware. Patrick Modiano is a good example of an author who writes about memory and traces of memories in history that have been lost in various ways. I am again reminded of his book Dora Bruder and the advertisement about the disappearance of Bruder that he found in an old newspaper. Here, too, we can think of the ad as a memory, and an impression, which in this case deals with the question of an individual’s fate. Thinking about the impressions and traces we humans leave behind becomes interesting when you consider the way Modiano uses the streets of a city as the very traces of a person’s life. To be able to go to physical locations to see where a person has been, at any point in time, is a rather dizzying thought. Imagine humans constantly leaving behind traces, or impressions, as we move through the world. Like the bird that left footprints for Mattis in Tarjei Vesaas’s novel The Birds, which someone else can then find and experience. Perhaps one could even go so far as to say that we humans, by leaving behind impressions, are like artists walking in and sketching the world.
I find it interesting to think about drawing as a language, and how that language can be filled. To return to my work with the lost Colombian bird, I would like to say that the work, while I was making it, grew a lot— in terms of breadth but also very much in terms of depth. This was largely due to the email correspondence between Alejandra and me. There is something monumental about thinking together. And like Modiano’s Dora Bruder, in which a story of human fates is revealed along the way, my work reveals a conversation about the feeling of wanting to leave one’s country.
Distance can be thought of in terms of geography. You can see on a map that there is an ocean between Sweden and Colombia. You can also see the borders of many countries in between, and you can calculate distance by the number of kilometres between Malmö and Bogotá. The global map is a starting point for our thinking about the world, but there are also parallel maps of our world that co-exist with the map we are familiar with. An example of this is a bird’s map of the world—a map based on how birds traverse the globe.
As the Crow Flies—The Straight Line
2021-05-03
"Dear Alejandra,
Today I was in my studio working for some hours. [...] I started to think upon a new project and I felt very happy and inspired. I found a bunch of old postcards recently, all of them with motifs
of airplanes on them. That made me think about our talks about distance. And also, the idea
of flying. I remembered the postcard you sent me, with the stamp of the bird that you told me about. I really fell in love with your idea of letting the little bird travel from you in Colombia to me in Sweden, over the big ocean—as if it were flying. It was unfortunate that the postcard never arrived. Who knows where the little bird decided to fly instead?
Along with these thoughts about distance, flying, airplanes and birds I started to think about
‘As the crow flies’. The measurement we have to know the shortest way between two spots, using a straight line. Isn’t it beautiful that we have a measurement based on how birds move?
Many hugs, and I hope we can still keep in touch even though it’s been so long.
Rebecca"48
From an artist’s perspective, the line is important. It’s one of the most fundamental elements of drawing, and the idea of the drawn line constantly recurs in my practice. I find it interesting that the idea of the line brings my thoughts back to the medium of drawing itself.
But the line can also represent, or symbolise, more tangible elements in our world. I mentioned borders as an example of marking distance earlier. The idea of borders and what they might mean to people in the world, especially people who are subject to them, can be dizzying. I thought about the little bird that was ready to travel all the way across the ocean, and how it might have felt to be sending a little bird on a journey that you might have wanted to be taking, too. I decided to draw a section of the ocean on a small sheet of paper. You see the ocean from above, from a bird’s-eye view, and on the small surface you see the wild ocean made up of many different currents and shapes. The paper the ocean is drawn on is cut out into an irregular shape that departs from the rectangular format that a piece of paper usually conforms to. In my opinion, we are so used to the standard rectangular format that we no longer see the four straight lines that make up the shape. By instead breaking up the rectangle and letting the lines deviate from the standard, we become more aware of these straight lines. And so the shape of the paper clearly corre- sponds to the drawn surface in terms of how to read the meaning of this work. The cut-out, dead-straight lines of the paper stand in contrast to the undulating lines in the drawn sea, like sharp borders. The work is called Havet har inga räta linjer (The Ocean Has No Straight Lines) (2023).49
I think about the importance of daring to pay attention to something small, something fleeting. Because if you do, there is a chance that this small thing can serve as a starting point for your thinking. And that’s where I want to be going —on a continued journey of thinking, but
also of language, experience, and drawing, through art.
My goal with this text was to think something through. To think about an essay written by a philosopher and try to apply it to myself and to what I do, to try to get a slightly deeper understanding of my own practice. Isn’t that how philosophy is supposed to work? It’s there so you can apply its thoughts to your own life and to your own understanding of the world, to see what happens. At least that’s how I relate, and want to relate, to philosophy. And this is exactly how I think a work of art can function —as something to think through. It can also function as something whose existence can give us a slightly better understanding of our own experience in the world, if we engage with the work. After all, to recall Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology one last time: you could say that experience is what we are.
Further references
Myter och Mysterier [Myths and Mysteries]. Episode 78, “Fåglarna” [The Birds]. Podcast, 50:00. November 2021. https://open.spotify.com/episode/7k9XWUBv- tyCPrWmkplyfUH?si=9432910f66c944f8.
Törnvall, Clara. Autisterna: om kvinnorna på spektrat [The Autistics: On Women on the Spectrum]. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2021.
Russon, John. Various lectures on philosophy. YouTube page. https://www.youtube. com/@JohnRusson123/videos.
Trotzig, Birgitta. Ett landskap: dagbok [A Landscape: Diary], fragments 54–58.
In Jaget och världen: ur författarverkstaden [The self and the world: From the authors’ workshop]. Stockholm: Bonnier, 2008.
1 Supermarket Art Fair is an art fair in Stockholm that started as an alternative to the city’s commercial art fair, Market.
2 Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo, Pocket Skies, 2016, 10 laminated graphite drawings, 9 x 6 cm
(a gift from Alejandra to Rebecca).
3 Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo, email to Rebecca Jansson, 29 November 2017. The correspondence between Alejandra and me is unedited and presented as received.4 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Konsten som grepp [Section of Aesthetics] (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1994), 101.
5 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 103. (English translation of quotation: Viktor Shklovsky,
“Art as Technique,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood (London: Longman, 1988), 20.)
6 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 101–103.
7 Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (Stockholm: Grate), 2014.
8 Mattias Kvick, handwritten note from 8 November 2021, in Modiano, Dora Bruder.
9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–192.
10 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 159.
11 Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwest University Press, 1972), 1–24.
12 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 9.
13 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 160
14 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 160–61.
15 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 161.
16 Vanna Bowles, For the Greater Good, Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg, 11 March–2 April 2017.
18 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162.
19 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162.
20 Vija Celmins, quoted in Samantha Rippner, introduction to The Prints of Vija Celmins, exhibition catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002), 30.
21 Bob Nickas, Vija Celmins (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2017), 24.
22 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of
the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
23 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 36. 24 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 36. 25 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 44–45.
26 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 7–9.
27 Rebecca Jansson, Om du tittar noga (If You Look Carefully), 2022, drawing installation, various dimensions.
28 Erik Blomberg, Öppna er, ögon: dikter [Open, eyes: Poems] (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1962).
29 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 44–45.
30 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 7.
31 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 7–9.
32 Tarjei Vesaas, Fåglarna [The Birds] (Stockholm: Lind, 2002).
33 Rebecca Jansson, Winged Migration (h, m, n, r, s, u, v, w, z), 2023, pencil on paper, series of 9 A3 papers.
34 Lucy Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers,” Artforum, October 1973, https://www.artforum.com/print/197308/ hanne-darboven-deep-in-numbers- 37981.
35 Hanne Darboven, Ein Jahrhundert (A Century), 1970–71, wooden shelf, ring binders, and framed sheets, 222 x 504 x 30 cm, 1970– 71, in the collection of Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.
36 Saint Augustinus, Confessions, book XI, chapter 14, trans. J. G. Pilkington, 397 and 400 AD, https://www.logoslibrary.org/ augustine/confessions/1114.html
37 On Kawara, One Million Years, 1999, artist book, 15.1 x 10.9 x 4.4 cm, in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York.
38 Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers.”
39 Lippard, “Hanne Darboven: Deep in Numbers.”
40 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162.
41 Rebecca Jansson, I believe the bird was green with a few parts painted in yellow and blue, 2022, pencil on paper, series of 16 drawings in postcard format (10 x15 cm each).
42 Zoe Leonard, New York Harbor I, 2016, two gelatin silver prints.
43 Derrida introduced the concept of différance in his book Speech and Phenomenon (1967), which is a term associated with Derrida’s philosophical theories of what he calls deconstruction. These theories address the relationship between written language and meaning. According to Derrida’s différance, there is no universal, or objective, meaning; rather, meaning varies depending on the individual perspective. For example, if a group of different people read the same text, it is possible that all these people will interpret the text in different ways. How each word is read and understood can affect the final interpretation of a text. To make his point, Derrida uses written language as an argument in his texts, that is, in how he makes use of language. He deliberately uses words that can be interpreted in ambiguous ways and are therefore difficult to translate into otherlanguages. Translating a word from French (Derrida’s language of writing) into English, for example, means that the full meaning of the French word is lost when an equivalent word in English is chosen to replace the original French word. Therefore, many French words remain in Derrida’s translated texts, along with clari- fying descriptions of how those particular words can be read and interpreted. Even the concept of différance is a play on words in precisely this way. It is a deliberate misspelling of the French word différence. It plays with the fact that the French word différer means both “to defer” and “to differ.” That the term is also misspelled means that you need to read the word to understand it—simply saying the word does not give the full sense of its meaning—because it is pronounced like différence. See Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenom- enon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stockholm: Thales, 1991).
44 Sigmund Freud, “Note on the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” in Collected Writings of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII, Neurosis and Psychosis (Stock- holm: Natur och Kultur, 2001), 151–55.
45 Freud, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” 152.
46 Freud, “A Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” 154
47 Rebecca Jansson, email to Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo, 3 March 2021.
48 Rebecca Jansson, email to Alejandra Bonilla Restrepo, 3 May 2021. The correspondence between Alejandra and me is unedited and presented as received.
49 Rebecca Jansson, The ocean has no straight lines, 2023, pencil on paper.