A pas–de–deux for pencil and paper
Screendance revelation: After several attempts to reenact the score drawings of my encounters on the street, I land back on the paper. In the actual writing by hand with the pencil on the paper, I recognise an everyday beauty. In both the writing of the letters and the actual drawing of the route of my participants’ home walks on paper, an everyday gesture shows its true body.
The letter-writing captured on film provides a glimpse of such an unnoticed part of everyday life: the automaticity of the writing hands’ movement, sometimes hesitatingly, sometimes shooting forward as an extension of the bubbling stream of thoughts.
Is it about the drawing as a 1-2-1 encounter on a sheet of paper and its performative character. Or just about seeing four hands appear on the screen, directing the pencil across the paper, like an actual walk. All this together gives an intimate view of what took place at that moment.
Draw a line. A clear line. The clear line, as the context of the habit.
The habit. Habit as a habitat. The habit of putting a pencil down on a blank sheet of paper and starting the route of a line.
It starts with a dot. A point. A starting point.
From there on, once it starts moving, the line will take shape and will make space.
A pencil on a paper, meandering, sometimes hesitant, to then rule the world with her carbon, leaving her traces, creating forms, thus generating significance.
A pencil, hoovering above the paper. Undecided of where it will go, of what will come next.
The loaded signals for its locomotion are still on their way, down from the neurological ‘head’–quarter flashing through the body, the neck, shoulder, arm, hand to eventually trigger the fingers.The food or fuel for its locomotion is still on its way, down from the neurological ‘head’–quarter flashing through the body, the neck, shoulder, arm, hand to eventually trigger the fingers.
Imperceptibly, they move the pencil in the right pattern and make it move back and forth on the sheet of paper, up and down, rising and falling as they go.
A stream of carbon, is plotted in a game of lines, sometimes letter by letter, patterns of movement language.
Or, more abstractly, a free line, guided by an undercurrent of progress, a line that follows a direction without premeditation, a visual pattern or a translation of a movement that thus becomes visible and tangible. Something looms up, on the empty surface.
A map, as a cartographic representation of what could be there.
An abstract conglomerate of curves, straights, visiting all the sides of the paper, hanging around in its corner or roaming in the middle. And randomly leaving some space white and unoccupied.
The life of a pencil on paper. Like a pas de deux. The paper gives the lines room to develop. The pencil takes up space, draws, sets the line in motion.
Its movement, becoming a choreography looking for its own habitat.
Away from the real, actual moving on the surface of a street, floor or ground it now finds a translation on paper.
MARIKENOVERDIJK 