superficies de paso

The lattice screen and the drain are perforated surfaces that govern what may cross a threshold. The lattice —that pierced panel closing windows, balconies or façades— lets light and air through while blocking the direct gaze from outside, metering out the privacy of the domestic. The drain does the same in reverse: set into the floor, it lets water through and holds back what should not leave, draining the intimate of the house towards the public of the sewer.

Both work like a stencil: they exist by and from the mould. They are matrix objects, meant to repeat and to exist in multiplicity, and their form is the form of what they let through. One filters the gaze; the other filters waste. One is on the wall; the other, on the floor. But both are ways of deciding what is let through and what is held back at the limit between the private and the public.

This activity starts from there: a play of shadows made with lattices and drains cut out of paper. Cast as shadow, both patterns —flowers, grilles, geometric weaves— become almost indistinguishable from one another. That ambiguity is the starting point for thinking of a space bounded not by walls but by the shadow itself: something untouchable that nonetheless marks an inside and an outside.

This workshop was led by María Paula Mendoza and Sofía Lozano within the First national gathering of women artists at Emblematic Art Gallery, alongside the exhibition “Desde sus adentros”, curated by Andrea Muñoz.