Collected
works

Collected
works

Space of Proximity, 2004

This project emerged while working—during the summer of 2004—in the letterpress workshop at the London College of Communication. I helped tidy and reorganize the whole workshop and while doing so, I found 3 huge boxes that were full of lead, old slugs, lines of text, sentences and words that have been created probably in the 1960’s-1970´s with a linotype machine.  The cast words and sentences were “sitting” there waiting to be recycled, destroyed and melted down to create new words, new sentences and new meanings.

I started to select them by their singular meanings, for their visual qualities or because I could feel they had some “hidden” potential. I ended up selecting around 600 (out of more than 3 or 4.000) and randomly grouped them into galleys. Initially I lay them as columns and printed them.  A “new language” emerged. It was a very powerful visual one, made out of different type fonts, different sizes and spacing that emerged by mixing them randomly.

A narrative started to emerge; a fragmented one, full of connotations and meanings and with linguistic qualities. They were no longer just visual. I started to analyze their qualities and soon I realized that they could represent, in a typographic way, the Deconstructivist theory by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

It is in that stage that I realized that I could divide the columns of text into little poems or fragmented narratives and once printed they became powerful systems of signification. 67 poetic narratives emerged and I decided to do a book.