Digital asemic 1-5 / Digital files printed on laid paper / 29,7x21cm / 2018 / Collezione Giuseppe Garrera – Rome
Scrivere disegnando / Collective exhibition / Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève / From 20.01 to 03.05.2020
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Scrivere Disegnando / Writing by drawing is an exhibition about writing and its shadow. It reviews various experiments, from the early 20th century to the present day, in which writing abandons its communicative function to venture into the realms of the illegible and the unspeakable. The exhibition aims to explore the tension between writing, in its strictly semantic dimension, and the terra incognita of the simple arabesque, the automatic, the repeated sign, and the scribble.
“Martina Stella’s artistic practice combines asemic writing with digital reproduction and video projection techniques, to explore the potential of the re-creation of writing, usually drawn by hand, with new technologies, which transform it into digital code. This research is developing in several directions, on the one hand by addressing the notion of asemic landscape, the origins, and modes of spatialization of the text through the projection of graphemes in the exhibition space. No longer on paper, but on the wall, Stella’s illegible ideograms extend horizontally or vertically; oscillating between two and three-dimensionality, they envelop the visitor with a noise. The Digital Asemic (2018) digital prints show a visual score, whose signs, directly inspired by objects and actions, are condensed into small symbols drawn by thin lines. In Chinese calligraphy, the gesture, beyond defining an object, reveals a state of mind. Impregnated with this art, Stella’s writing reveals a particular and complex relationship with the perception of reality”.
The prevoius texts are a personal translation of the exhibition catalogue Ecrire en dessinant, quand la langue cherche son autre published by Edition Skira in 2020.
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