Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#13827

El Rio / The River : A Collaboration

Artists
Zoe Leonard and Dolores Dorantes
Date
2018
Publisher
Gato Negro Ediciones
Format
Artists' Books
ISBN
978-607-97969-3-8
Size
23 × 17 cm
Length
156 pp
Genre
Photography, Poetry
Description

The book collects unpublished photographs that the American artist Zoe Leonard has taken along the Rio Grande (or Río Bravo) in 2017 and texts commissioned for this project from Dolores Dorantes, Mexican poet and activist, who has been exiled to the United States for years. The book is an immersion into the physical context, the actual barrier; the very heart of the border between Mexico and the United States: the waters of the Río Bravo or Rio Grande. A number of figures in the water recall something else: skin, scars, wrinkles, genitals, the writing of an unknown language. A poem made of photographs, and the depiction of that sequence with a poem made of words. Or rather, a broken bilingual, visual-textual attempt of conversation over the tensions in between a simple, ever-changing but always the same flow of water, and all the terrible complexities around, above, beneath it.

The argument could be simple: at the end and at the beginning, it is only water. As simple, complex, beautiful and terrible as that. Or maybe not: to complete the argument it is necessary to summon the ghost of the body that runs through it.

In the words of Dolores Dorantes: I’m going to walk on water. Say. Bring me all those parts of the body and put them here. Say. I’m the body and I’m on the table. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa, en la estructura divisoria del mundo. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa del mercado del mundo. Soy tu cuerpo y estoy sobre la mesa, donde se encausa la corriente del mundo. I’m the farce, arranged at strategic points of our territories. Between the face and neck, for example. Between the anchored ankle and satisfaction.

Softcover, perfect-bound, b/w

  1. El Rio / The River
 

Related Items

  1. Justin Apperly: Freeze Up Break Up
  2. Stephen Gill: Hackney Wick
  3. Michalis Pichler: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility #TwitterVersion
  4. Julien Jonas Bismuth and Jean-Pascal Flavien: Plouf!
  5. Richard Long: Arnoavon
  6. Terence Reeves: Between the Skyline and the River
  7. Craig Leonard: Michael Fernandes
  8. Lars Ahlstrom and Hans Anders Molin: Airspace
  9. Smoke Room 4
  10. Smoke Room 3
  11. Jesus Days
  12. Guantanamo.
  13. Leah James: Night Skies
  14. Leah James: photographs
  15. Filipe Casaca: Blue Mud Swamp
  16. Filipe Casaca: my home is where you are (a minha casa é onde estás)
  17. Eric Doeringer: Autobiography (after Sol LeWitt)
  18. Katrin Koffman: Ensembles Assembled: In Full Color
  19. Mira Mexico
  20. Ryan Trecartin: Yet
  21. Un Ano de Basura (One Year of Garbage)
  22. A Sudden Drop
  23. A Sudden Drop Collector’s Edition
  24. Portraits by Waiters
  25. Wheels and Trophies
  26. Thomas Mailaender: The Night Climbers of Cambridge
  27. Stephen Gill: Coming Up For Air
  28. Justin Yong: gentle
  29. Nicholas Gottlund and Suzanna Zak: The Copier
  30. Robin Nishio: Wailed
  31. Common
  32. David Horovitz: Mood Disorder
  33. Tess Roby: succession of divers into the pool
  34. Peter MacCallum: Documentary Projects 2005 - 2015
  35. Brad Elterman: Villa Le Rêve
  36. Jason Roberts Dobrin: Los Angeles Photo Book
  37. Rohan Hutchinson: Elemental
  38. Paul Collins: VENT