The Problem of Freedom
Alejandro Figueredo Díaz-Perera
Since my mother was a Cuban lawyer for a government firm, I experienced the many processes of law-making and bureaucracy from a very early age from seeing her do her job. The stamp was always the physical proof that a rule, a document, or a process was approved, not necessarily by her but by the system in place. I also had to have documents stamped on many occasions, inside Cuba and then outside when I left. And every time I travel it’s an arduous process. I won’t go deep into the history of the ink stamp but from its conception it has been used often as a tool of control, limitation, repression, but also organization and legality, so it’s an object with a two-faced meaning.
Stamps are used to organize and divide people into groups, who is allowed in and who is left out of a certain system. These series of drawings are a way, I found, of freeing the object from it’s meaning, by using it as an instrument of mark making, but also by freeing the act of drawing itself as I play between control and chance, letting the object dictate what it wants to do and not the other way around. The drawings become documents of my movements, or my body, as it is the case with the larger ones. Most of them are made on the floor pressing with the weight of my body over the stamp, sometimes holding one point and turning another side of the stamp to create circular patterns, sometimes holding up the paper with the stamp as I shake my whole body to create something like a seismographic record of my movement. It’s like learning to draw all over again.
Stamps are used to organize and divide people into groups, who is allowed in and who is left out of a certain system. These series of drawings are a way, I found, of freeing the object from it’s meaning, by using it as an instrument of mark making, but also by freeing the act of drawing itself as I play between control and chance, letting the object dictate what it wants to do and not the other way around. The drawings become documents of my movements, or my body, as it is the case with the larger ones. Most of them are made on the floor pressing with the weight of my body over the stamp, sometimes holding one point and turning another side of the stamp to create circular patterns, sometimes holding up the paper with the stamp as I shake my whole body to create something like a seismographic record of my movement. It’s like learning to draw all over again.
Customs
Series of drawings with rubber stamp ink on paper
Series of drawings with rubber stamp ink on paper
