As a child, I was always astonished with classroom blackboards, which had the incredible capacity of telling hundreds of different stories a day, always on the same surface. Numbers, words and drawings were documented, only to be erased, and then scrawled anew, the process repeating over and over again.

Water calligraphy, an elegant strategy for appropriating public space in Chinese cities, involves a similar process of perpetual editing. By means of a water-soaked paintbrush, ordinary citizens enjoy writing classical poetry on the pavement, using the cement modules as a guiding grid for forming characters. These poems can only be read before the water evaporates and also before a new text is written over the previous one. Through this process, the sidewalk is gradually transformed into a celebration of poetry.

In our current moment, dominated by virtual communication, weblogs have emerged as an electronic, communal, alternative to the traditional blackboard. This format allows one to link, delete, comment upon and expand content. Weblogs also share the immediacy of chalk.

Ink, as opposed to chalk, has always been the essence of printed matter. However, water calligraphy re-invents ink in a delible form… more

When drawn on a body, flat depictions take on spatial characteristics, returning them to the physical reality from which they took their inspiration. They also become capable of movement, contorted by the particular characteristics of the skin, and body, they are inscribed upon.

Jose Arnaud Bello’s work, Koi Convolutions, refers to Darcy Thompson’s Transformations Theory. Using an image of a Koi to illustrate the geometrical adjustments that a tattoo must make once it is applied to a body. Such a drawing has to adapt to the body’s curves, abiding by anatomical rules. This necessity for adaptation intensifies as the size of the tattoo increases. The larger the tattoo, the more it distorts from its original pattern.

Similarly, architects also translate two dimensional representations into a four dimensional world that has very different constraints. Architectural documents, which are not absolute, must deform to adapt to the complexities of spatial reality when translated to a real site. It is the ink that allows this deformation, as it is flexible enough to adapt to the morphology of its new context, maturing with the passage of time alongside the body it is inscribed upon. Ink, that through its transfer from the planar geometry of the printed page, is able to embody new meaning as it adjusts to the world.

Daniel Fernàndez Pascual

Isabel Martínez Abascal