Todas las calles del año en Latinoamérica. Abril, 2013-2015.

Author: Andrea Canepa

Polyptych composed of 30 framed drawings of 44x34 cmt.

Chinese ink, watercolor on paper.

This is part of a project undertaken by the artist over several years for which she received an Endesa scholarship (2013-2015).

It is a series of 365 drawings in Chinese ink, water colours and marker that show the streets of Latin America whose names commemorate historical dates.

All the drawings are done in the same colour range because the artistic process is a recreation. Rather than using real images, the artist finds them on the Internet using browsers such as Google Street View and Panoramio.

Each drawing depicts the street and includes a short paragraph with the name, location and a brief explanation of the historical event after which it is named. This leads to a “certain understanding of the way in which the individual, collective and cultural memory take care of experiences that transcend the bearable limits of reality”.

The different works depict scenes like a small neighbourhood shop, an auto dealership, a home in the country, a skyscraper, a park fountain, a football stadium, the School of Philosophy, a hotel, the front of a supermarket or an abandoned building.

In the words of Johanna Caplliure, the author of a catalogue of this work, they are “spaces that displace the historical reference from the larger story to the smaller stories about other forms of everyday life in the world”.

The project is limited to the streets of Latin America because the artist is interested in gathering historical events in relation to the solar calendar, the changing seasons and the Earth’s rotation during the calendar year. She is also interested in investigating and reflecting on the mechanisms for building the knowledge of historical memory “in which emotional life, the structures that strengthen a disadvantaged social group and the technologies used to institutionalise the events that happen to a people proliferate”.

This work looks at the “urban layout of different Latin American cities and the historical events that take place in those cities”.