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I'm Joanna Pyroneves, your host, and this is exhibitionist this
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I'm an independent writer and curator with a wide-ranging 2
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decades career in contemporary art, from commercial galleries
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to art fairs, from research to curating, from Lisbon to London
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through Paris. But when I'm asked what I do
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outside the out world, the inevitable reaction is, oh, I
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don't know anything about contemporary art.
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Ouch. So call it a midlife crisis,
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call it arrogance, but I gave myself the task of trying to
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fill that gap with Co host conversation.
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Episodes centered around a genuine exchange of thoughts,
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feelings and precious context around solo exhibitions,
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interviews and special episodes based on a particular topic to
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keep you alert and on your toes. If you want to read further into
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some of the topics discussed in the episodes and more, you can
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also find me on Sub Stack under my name, Joanna Pyroneves.
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Consider this episode as a surprise.
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I like to work on smaller episodes when a topic feels
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right, and today is one of those days.
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Recently I was invited to talk about paper in a seminar at ABK
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Stuttgart, a Fine Arts university in Germany.
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It was an inaugural speech, so I wanted to do something
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different, perhaps a bit more performative.
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I've lived with paper for so many years, being married to an
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artist who uses it like a flat body, folding it, bending it,
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dabbing it with cement and graphite, adjusting his strength
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to the fragility of its slightly grainy material.
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Paper is what we write on, but I do prefer to write on a
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keyboard, looking at a screen. This back and forth between
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screens and sheets made me think of the German artist Edema
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Blanc. I Co curated her touring
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exhibition with my friend and colleague Joanna Carier, which
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led us to spend time with the artist in Milan interviewing
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her, finding out more and more about her and the works she had
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hardly shown during her lifetime, as well as those she
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was known for, at least in her hometown.
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Blanc passed away on the 14th of April 2023, so this episode is a
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homage to someone who came close to being a mentor, a notion she
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would have abort as much as I do.
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Imagine in the early 1960s, a German woman struggling to find
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her words in Italian. She's young, she's in Sicily and
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she's starting a new life with her mathematician lover.
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She's an artist who is as well read as she's obsessed with art
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making. Little by little the Italian
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language sinks in. She starts mastering it and
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communication expands beyond the home into the city, the shops,
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the beaches. She becomes bilingual and thus
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bicultural. But it's a two way St.
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She speaks and she's spoken to. There is finally communication.
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She verbalizes her thoughts and others respond.
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She welcomes another world into the world.
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She builds at home, home, city, island, country, language,
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culture, people. Then starts another process,
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much deeper and more unsettling. She finds out that there is a
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world of learnt words that mean things she doesn't know, or
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rather, that simply do not exist in her own language.
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New words in a new language reveal new sensations, new
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opinions, new structures and even new values.
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So slowly and somewhat painfully, she realises that,
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quote, there is no such thing as the right word, UN quote.
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For every language there is a cluster of secret compartments
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leading to unknown territories for those who don't speak it,
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but also, and more strikingly so, for those who learn it.
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So dads in Portuguese, awkward in English, Chun siqua in
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French, so many words that unlock different doors in the
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soul, that can potentially engorge the heart and create new
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ramifications of existence. The artist realized that
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expecting words to be precise, logical, equivalent with another
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word in another language is a futile exercise.
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Those objects she loved so much, books, did not have an exact
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correspondence in their Italian equivalent.
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Her Italian life would be solipsistic and untransmissible.
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There is no such thing as the right word.
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Humans were made to speak different languages so as not to
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come together and be greater than God.
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The Testament says Testament is legacy, but it's also a book
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written in Greek. And what if her children didn't
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learn the German language? If so, she would remain locked
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inside her own heart, a side of her that they would never
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understand. She would not be whole.
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This is the experience of the immigrant.
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There is a past that is dislocated, and its place is no
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longer accessible as life, only as intermittent experience at
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best. That's why books are so
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important. They contain a whole world
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inside them. But the woman discovered they
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could never be wholly transposed on to another place.
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The books were as much place as her home country and her
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language. Their pages carry the past that
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would be only hers and not understood by her new people.
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And what is understanding? Is it dependent upon
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communication? Is it the message, the
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messenger, or the air molecules pushed so as to make a sound,
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which becomes a word, Or the paper gathered in the
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rectangular shape and forming a book where each page forms the
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strange layered object filled with words?
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And what if you don't understand the words?
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Perhaps if the words are released of their function, one
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really starts listening to the page, feeling its gentle touch
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and connecting with its matter as a complex material and as a
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subtle machine, a medium. Meanwhile, in 1964, Marshall
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Mcluhan was publishing a text marking a new turn in the modern
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world by stating that the medium is the message.
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Using the example of electricity, he explained what
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the medium was. He was talking about the
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substratum, the surface, the thing that materializes images
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and texts, that renders visible, audible, constant.
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Even the medium is, he said, what causes the message to
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happen. So messages do not exist in
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limbo, waiting to be caught by a mediator, a device.
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Think of electricity as medium, McClure exemplified.
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Quote. Whether the light is being used
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for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of
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indifference. It could be argued that these
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activities are in some way the content of the electric light,
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since they could not exist without the electric light.
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This fact merely underlines the point that the medium is the
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message, because it is the medium that shapes and controls
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the scale and form of human association and action.
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UN quote. 20 years later, in 1986, Ursula K Le Guin would
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publish a text titled The Carrier Back Theory of Fiction
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where she speculated inspired by the feminist anthropology
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theorist Elizabeth Fisher. The human spent much more time
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carrying things than killing animals and making weapons to do
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so. In prehistory, A vessel might be
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a better characterization of the medium because it nuances the
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relationships within communication, the solidarity
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between the carried, the carrier, the carrying act, the
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sender and the recipient, but also the intentions behind each
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communication and the expectations.
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Perhaps the medium is not the message then.
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This famous saying, as seductive as it is, simplifies a more
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nuanced relationship between the writer, the page, the text and
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the reader. If we think of Le Guin, we can
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imagine prehistoric times like she did in her text, and
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contemplate hands meticulously and masterfully interlacing
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strands of Mulberry tree fibre, having fun with it, creating,
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discovering a material. But woven together these strands
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make a carrier or a bag. Together, these strands allowed
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one to carry things. Once the things were deposited
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in the Hut, apples, for example, no one would think of eating the
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carrier or the bag. One would eat the apples, one
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would eat the message. However, because the apples
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could be carried, ideas of stocking and fermenting
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flourished. Without the carrying, they would
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not have been possible. The medium effects reality
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behaviours. So the medium is a vessel that
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is not neutral. It has a material and a history,
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but mostly it bears possibility. The medium is technology in the
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sense that it is a spark of invention through play once used
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to carry things, sign based messages or apples.
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It sparks novelty. But more importantly, Le Guin
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chose to focus on the carrier because it tells a different
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story and points to different characters.
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Rather than the story of violence, it recounts the story
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of patience, caring and invention.
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In a sense, this is what Mcluhan was saying as well, that we
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failed to recognise the carriers, the mediums, the
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vessels, the technologies that shape our messages and therefore
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our worlds. In the words of Donna Harroway,
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it matters what matters we use to think other matters with.
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It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with.
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It matters what not, not with thoughts.
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Think thoughts with descriptions.
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Describe descriptions with ties, tie ties.
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It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make
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stories. Going back to the 60s in 1969 on
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Kowara would create a medium message based work.
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The sentence I'm still alive on the telegram.
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Basically, the telegram itself, regardless of text, told all of
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on Koara's friends that he was alive there and then in that
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time and place. Marking in time and place with a
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photo or any recorded gesture is an existential proof.
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The sentence I'm still alive is what we call a tautology in
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logic, a pleonasm in rhetoric, and a good or a bad joke,
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depending upon your sense of humor.
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In day-to-day life, it points to the ultimate medium, the living,
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breathing body. In the 60s, bureaucracy still
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involved paper, and paper was thus eloquent.
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Around that time, Irma Blanc, the German artist in Sicily,
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started drawing on her journal or writing in her drawings,
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whatever 1 prefers. She started the series
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Eigenschriften, which she went on to produce until she moved to
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Milan. In the 1970s.
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She developed different acemic calligraphies, that is,
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different calligraphies without words.
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When I asked Rosanna, her daughter, what memories she had
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of her mum, then she shared the funny recollection with me.
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One day she was excited to go back home and tell her mother
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something that had happened at school.
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Whatever happened at school, she forgot.
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What she can recall is her mother asking her with a hand
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gesture to wait until she had finished writing.
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Rosanna looked at her mother's paper and it was indeed a
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writing, but without words. There were lines and lines of
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the same calligraphic effort, but there were no words to speak
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of. It was a flow of wordless and
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yet cohesively handwritten lines.
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What might have crossed the child's mind?
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The static snow at the end of TV broadcasting back in the day.
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Listening to the paper is not a given.
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One can argue that the drawing, these writings for oneself,
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Eigenschrifton, are the meeting point between the paper, the
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pastels, and the personal memory of writing and reading, of
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shedding the love of words, the love of the beautiful phrase,
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the enchanting sound of verses rhyming, the love for
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literature. Like On Kowara, Blank had gone
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through a traumatic war as a child, as an inheritance of a
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generation before her. Like him, she chose another
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language to live in. On Kowara was Japanese and moved
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to New York in 1965 and focused on the medium, the conventions
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of time. For him, the shape of the book,
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for her as a tool that had to be deconstructed.
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My work is a book whose pages are scattered and cannot come
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back together again, she told us when she moved to Milan, Paper
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met information and civilization, the outer world.
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She started placing a fine tracing paper on everything she
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read and transcribed it painstakingly.
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She covered words with the drawing material, which
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extracted, as it were, the shape, the system, the structure
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of organized information. The series is called
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Rascrezzioni Transcription, but it's more than that.
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The paper became a transitional device from a verbal sign to an
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index, one of those signs that exist because the material that
00:15:50
reveals them is affected by the sign itself.
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A footprint, an analogue photograph.
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The shiver. The words became marks, which is
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to say an encounter between two bodies.
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She also made books with the same calligraphy over the real
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books she read. But she also deconstructed
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newspapers in an effort of producing real communication.
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She plays her trascritzioni works on newspaper kiosks and
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other ads in the street. Paradoxically, listening to the
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paper was silencing the page. She looked for silence.
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The true form of communication, where energy, love,
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concentration, focus sits with blank paper, is the language of
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audible silence. In the bookshop in Milano, Blank
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read one of her transcricioni books.
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Her mouth closed, her lips are moving, humming.
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I say this is a paradox because it was at this time that she
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realized, while sitting alone in her kitchen, that the paper
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being drawn on produced a sound. It seemed to speak its own
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language of receptacle or container of medium.
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The medium was not hiding anymore.
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It became loud so as to celebrate contact rather than
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the personal experience of reading this or that book,
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rather than personal preference. Edema never said what books she
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transcribed. As much as I insisted she
00:17:23
resisted. We never knew she produced her
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own books. Spaces of silence where words
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disappeared to make space for the cellulose, the ink, the
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folds, the pages like little screens.
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The book as the first mobile phone, the first metaverse.
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The reality of the infinite folds of imagination.
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After she'd lost her husband, Blank took to making thick lines
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over some of his mathematical books by a process of osmosis,
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the magical formula of love, which is a form of loss, The
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page was now the absent body, the place of a new form of
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silence. Through a process of crossing
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out and making thick lines, she journeyed to Deep Blue and to a
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correspondence between her soul. There is her breath and the
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line. Breathing in, she dipped the
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brush in the paint. Breathing out, she produced 1
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blue line until there was no more air to exhale.
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And again and again and again. From language to writing to book
00:18:41
to drawing to paper to voice to line to breath.
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The body as a medium, the paper as body.
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At the turn of the century, as many artists from her generation
00:18:56
Blank saw, the information, communication and data were
00:19:00
connected. But her focus was on what
00:19:04
communication would become once the world established itself as
00:19:08
a global net across the world. Thus she started a new series
00:19:12
called Global Writings, Moving Away from Paper.
00:19:16
It seemed that paper, after all, was a personal affair, a diary,
00:19:21
a skin, a body. Not unlike the world around her.
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Blank was local, a mixture of local and global.
00:19:28
She was a polyglot. She had several worlds LED in
00:19:32
her through language. So she devised a new one with
00:19:35
eight consonants. CDHJLMR&T and proceeded to
00:19:43
produce works with it. She wanted to create a language
00:19:47
which would sound completely alien.
00:20:17
She worked on this series and another previous one on the
00:20:23
computer, moving away from paper.
00:20:26
She was now using a virtual space that was not mediated by
00:20:30
paper. The hands tapped rather than
00:20:33
dance on the paper. The material was plastic, all
00:20:37
polymer rather than cellulose or any of the surface reacting like
00:20:42
paper to the touch. So, unhappy with the silent and
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cold body, Blank vigorously went back to the space of the paper.
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This body and skin she had now discovered as an entity with
00:20:56
which to collaborate. So she produced the series
00:20:59
Avantesto. Avantesto were also made in
00:21:02
polyester, which is probably here as a sort of hyper paper,
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as she was eager to use her whole body, her two hands
00:21:11
grabbing as many Biro pens as she could to produce a vibration
00:21:15
enacting the sound of its making.
00:21:27
Blank is part of a generation of artists who created the simple
00:21:31
system based on the philosophy of mark making as an existential
00:21:35
collaboration between signifying bodies.
00:21:39
Her path is of a rigorous devotion to silence as
00:21:42
communication and paper as it's ancient technology, perhaps one
00:21:47
of the most minimal of her time. Many moons ago, I was talking to
00:21:54
an artist on the phone. I lived in Paris then, and so
00:21:57
did this artist. Suddenly he interrupted the
00:22:01
conversation and asked me if there was a thunderstorm in my
00:22:05
neighborhood. And how strange that it was so
00:22:08
sunny back where he lived. In fact, this was not a
00:22:11
meteorological phenomenon. It was my husband drawing at the
00:22:16
time. He took thick, white, large
00:22:18
expanses of paper and spent long hours marking it with folds,
00:22:22
closing and opening flaps of paper, then folding it again.
00:22:27
Opening, closing, folding. The paper started to take the
00:22:31
shape of a strange container, then a more geometric form, and
00:22:35
then after a considerable amount of time, it became a perfect
00:22:38
cube of about 80 centimeters. As soon as the paper had taken
00:22:43
this new shape, he placed graphite chunks inside through
00:22:47
one of the edges. As soon as these grey and greasy
00:22:50
bits of matter were trapped inside, he would apply pH
00:22:54
neutral tape on all edges of the cube and proceed to shake it.
00:22:58
The cube would go up and down, left and right, or more
00:23:01
elegantly, in circles. The graphite chunks were
00:23:05
painstakingly moved around so as to touch the paper.
00:23:09
While holding this enormous cube, he imagined the trajectory
00:23:13
of the graphite bits and tried to control the remains of their
00:23:16
bodies, becoming traces on the paper.
00:23:19
The graphite bits were now graphite beads.
00:23:22
The movement of the cubes scrubbed the matter away from
00:23:25
all sides, turning them into spheres.
00:23:27
Little planets moving about in a sort of mark, making Big Bang.
00:23:32
This operation was noisy. First the paper being folded and
00:23:36
unfolded, then after a while, the heavy breathing of his body,
00:23:40
kneeling, crouching, grabbing, folding, trying to collaborate
00:23:46
with the paper, and the paper finally yielding to the extent
00:23:49
of its properties. Then came the sound part of the
00:23:52
process, the shaking and rubbing of the graphite on the internal
00:23:56
side of the paper cube. It was a roaring sound that made
00:24:00
me think of 1000 Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels, but also
00:24:05
of the explosive discharge of heat after lightning in a storm.
00:24:09
No one talks about the sound of drawing, he once told me,
00:24:13
echoing what was going on in my mind and foreshadowing this day,
00:24:18
the 16th of April 2025, in my own house, in my studio, where
00:24:27
we're both around in the house, representing somehow the ancient
00:24:33
avant-garde, objective, symbolic, political,
00:24:37
sustainable, social and literal language of paper.
00:24:46
This episode was recorded on the 16th of April 2025, two years
00:24:51
and two days after EMS passing. For this episode I've had the
00:24:55
assistance of the Artist Gallery in Bologna, Italy.
00:24:59
P420A. Big thanks to Alessandro,
00:25:03
Fabrizio, Chiara and Vanya for their attention to detail, not
00:25:07
only for this episode but also for the exhibitions, the visits
00:25:12
to Edema's house. And finally, a huge thank you to
00:25:16
Irma's children, namely the relentless Rosanna, who unveiled
00:25:20
so many things about her mother's practice and supported
00:25:23
her work at a late stage of her life, managing the visits to the
00:25:27
studio and the work. The music of the episode is by
00:25:31
Satan and the text was written by me.
00:25:33
It's an excerpt of a lecture given on the 3rd of February
00:25:36
2025 at ABK Stuttgart, whose title was The Paper is
00:25:41
Impatient, under the invitation of the drawing department and
00:25:46
their teachers Catherine Trevor and Hannah Henan Kemper.
00:25:50
The sounds were recordings of Edema's works, so the sounds of
00:25:56
the making of Edema Blanc's Eigen, Shifton, Radical
00:25:59
Writings, Avantesto, Hypertext and Hatch Clear.
00:26:10
If you're here, you're probably enjoying the episode, so if you
00:26:15
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00:26:38
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exhibitionist. This considers you one of those
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Now something a bit different. I'd also love to start a
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