Klik hier voor Nederlands
As a Colombian artist living in Europe – first in France, and now in the Netherlands – Maria Paris Borda (1992) is gradually losing command of her native tongue. By now her daily life and thinking processes take place in an in-between world of languages. As a result she became interested in translation as a creative force: an area that brings together the political and poetic aspects of language. Through her installations, texts, films, and artist’s books, the artist wants to uncover the wealth of stories developed in this interspace, thereby zooming in on both personal and more universal histories. Her installation Composición de Lugar (2024), i.e. composition of space, is an excellent example of this.
Composición de Lugar consists of a small, tiled floor, with some of the tiles decorated with one half of the word supendida (suspended). Depending on how the tiles are arranged, the word is either formed or pulled apart, and therefore literally suspended. The empty parentheses ( ) enhance the feeling that the spaces between the words contain undefined meaning. The physical tiles themselves are also symbolic of transformation. Made in Colombia using a traditional technique, they were then shipped to the Netherlands. Here, in their new context, they acquired a different meaning. The title is based on a poem by the Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer, who is known for her concrete poetry in which sound, punctuation and spacing are more important than the words themselves.
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)