Cities in Flight, or the Satellite Variations
Claudia de la Torre
November 22 - December 14, 2019
Opening: Thurs, November 21, 2019, 19 hr
einBuch.haus / Florastraße 61, 13187 Berlin
Claudia de la Torre’s works often start from a book. She examines the structure and relationship between the surfaces and forms – the book covers, titles, the layout of the individual pages. By means of appropriation and dé-tournement, her work often takes the form of an artist book, a library or an archive. How is our knowledge of the world organized, classified and archived? What are the underlying systems of our knowledge? How do we approach what we learn of the world? For her new work Cities in Flight or The Satellite Variations, de la Torre takes James Blish’s science fiction novel as a starting point to examine the structure of story-telling and to build up a parallel narrative to the one evident in the story.
By stressing words in the existing storyline, de la Torre develops a parallel world that overlays the pre-existing utopia laid out in the book. Claudia de la Torre suggests one of boundless possibilities of how the wordsconnect to each other, the variations being almost as infinite as space. She applies the principle of improvisation to a system whose conjunctions are usually ruled by grammar and by a logic reliant on meaning. The words the artist selects are like tones played from a scale that is prescribed by Blish’s selection of words (not forgetting the voices of the readers). While side A of the record reflects a storyline deliberately composed by the artist, side B is constructed by chance of words spinning in an orbit, forming arbitrary alliances. Both storylines captured on the respective sides of the record create a parallel universe spinning around Blish’s story – just as a satellite spins around Earth.
Text : NADJA QUANTE
Claudia de la Torre
Berlin-based artist and publisher Claudia de la Torre (1986, Mexico City) studied Fine Arts at the ENPEG ‘La Esmeralda in Mexico City, and holds a masters degree by the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe (Silvia Bächli class). Since 2011 director of the publishing house backbonebooks, having published more than 89 titles and editions.
She has been awarded several scholarships and grants including the Shannon Michael Cane Fellowship - Printed Matter NYC (2018). National Fund for the Arts (FONCA), México (2017), Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg (2016), Frida Kahlo scholarship for woman artists DAAD, Germany (2016) and the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung (2016).
de la Torre has been teaching artist books workshops in several places such as the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, HKDM Freiburg and the École Supérieure des beaux-arts de Nîmes, France. Her work is part of diverse collections including theThomas J. Watson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color - Yale Library, and the MoMa (NYC).
einBuch #10
Cities in Flight, or the Satellite Variations
Claudia de la Torre, 2016
soft cover, perfect binding, gouache on dog-eared pages, 12” dub plate
Signed and numbered edition of 10 + 2 A.P
Exhibition view: Cities in Flight, or the Satellite Variations, einBuch.haus, 2019 (Photo: Olivia Kwok)
