Kaleidoscopic No. 3: Claudia de la Torre

constellations, portals, and other multiplicities in the art of books

Claudia de la Torre is a Mexican, Berlin based artist who creates artworks situated at the intersection of printed media, artist’s books, and installation. Using the basic concept of a book as her guide, de la Torre examines the structures and relationships of surface, form, and ideas. In 2011 de la Torre founded backbonebooks, an experimental publishing imprint that has published 78artist’s books and editions and continues to produce work. She is an active member of the Künstlerbund Baden-Württembergand of the ABC (Artists Books Cooperative). Through backbonebooks, she tables at numerous international art book fairs, and in 2018 she was the recipient of the Shannon Michael Cane Award for Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair.

De la Torre holds a BA from the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” (2009). In 2010 she was the first Mexican artist to obtain the Frida Kahlo Scholarship for Women Artists granted by the DAAD, which allowed her to pursue an MA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany

Leonardo Bravo

Hello, Claudia, this is Leonardo Bravo, and we are here both in Berlin doing an interview for the third feature with Kaleidoscopic Projects, which is the new arts and culture platform that I've launched here in Berlin. I am so happy to have you be part of this, so thank you so much.

Claudia de la Torre

Well, thank you very much. I'm really glad that our paths meet again, and I'm really excited to talk to you about what I do.

Leonardo Bravo

This is really great because through connections that we have in LA, I looked at your work, I think probably about year and a half ago. And I have always been so drawn to the work of designers in a really broad way in thinking of visual culture, of using a kind of research based, critical thinking approach. And I really saw that in your work. So I was very drawn to that. So I'm happy that we then got to meet here in person in Berlin. I wanted to start a little bit, knowing that you have been here in Berlin for a while now, but originally from Mexico, so I wanted to find a little bit more about where you're from, how you grew up. I read somewhere that your dad had been an influence to you because he was a collector of things.

Claudia de la Torre

Yeah, sure. So I guess, first of all, to start off by saying that it's funny that the first thing that you say is that you're interested in how designers have around critical thinking. Well, I am actually not a designer, but, I'm actually an artist. So this idea of sometimes how my work's perceived in different fields and how it sometimes fluctuates in between design art and, other mediums.

Leonardo Bravo

Ah, thank you for the clarification! Yet it's also such a great thing that it can be a pleasure to blur those boundaries like that...

Claudia de la Torre

It's nice, but at some point in my career, it was also quite confusing. Because I didn't know how to define myself, so I didn't know to say, okay, am I an artist who makes books? Am I also allowed to actually work as a designer? Throughout the years, I've been trying to free myself from those boundaries and definitions, that's also a reason and we'll talk about it later, why I decided to create backbonebooks. It's also one of the reasons why I try to be more flexible with the way I work. But let's start in the beginning. I guess I often get asked what is behind my work. What do I want to say or how did I even start making art, where do my interests begin?

Claudia de la Torre

And you know, I could give a very philosophical answer, but sometimes uncomplicated answers are actually the core. And in this case, I guess I was trying to do things that my father would understand. So when I was a young girl I used to spend a lot of time helping him organize and classify his stamp collection. So actually my dad had a very boring job, in my eyes - he led an insurance company, so nothing creative. But he had this other part where he would sit. He would sit at the table with me and we would look throughout his collection and find new ways to order it and find relations between images.

Claudia de la Torre

And then, we would actually put them inside of stamp books. Right? Albums that are ordered. He used to classify them by, for example, countries, but also, categories like space or animals, butterflies, etc. So in this way, this relation of working inwards - because I do a lot of books and also like working inwards, really influenced the way I started to think about reorganizing things we already know to show a new way of looking at them. So, that's why I say my father is a big influence on the way I work nowadays.

Leonardo Bravo

That is so interesting because it's like a visual indexing or visual categorization that happens with stamps. I remember as a little kid in Chile, my father also collected stamps, my grandfather had collected stamps. So there's a sense of a tradition passed on. And then you're so focused on the little images, these little visual worlds, you know, how these things that are being conveyed visually,

Claudia de la Torre

And it's analog, it's like quite an analog way of doing things. Each stamp is a world of its own. What was very impactful is that my father had this huge collection, and still knew what he didn't have, I would go stamp hunting with him. We would go to secondhand markets or to shops, and he knew instantly - I have this, I don't have this. Almost an encyclopedic ability to recall specific categories or types.

Leonardo Bravo

Let's pick up a little bit from there, from that experience and seeing how your father saw the world through this collection. How did that influence later on when you went to art school and I think you went to art school, both in Mexico, and then you ended up coming to Germany, right, for university here?

Claudia de la Torre

I was not looking for it or anything, but while I was studying in Mexico I had the chance to go to Germany for one semester. That was 2008 and the moment I arrived in Germany, I had in my mind that I wanted to work with the concept of repetition, difference, and memory. I thought, how could I convey memory, and in which way? How can I take that idea and manifest it in an analog, visual and direct way? That is the first time I ever made an artist's book. This piece links forward to my latest work that I want to tell you about later. It was a very simple idea, but I had to take it to its limit. I even had the title for it before I even started: Black Snow.

Claudia de la Torre

I bought a copy machine and started with a blank A4-sized paper. I made up a rule in my head - how to get back to white again, by photocopying this white piece of paper and depleting the toner. How many copies do I need to make in order to go back to white?

Claudia de la Torre

So for me to do that, I had to set some boundaries. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna do a hundred pages a day. And in a way, you know, see the physical change, the memory of the material going from white to gray, to black, and then to gray, and to white again, to fade out. A copy is never a copy, but it's always losing something throughout the way or gaining something throughout. Its changing.

Claudia de la Torre

In the end, I had all of these photocopies, more than 3,000 of them. And I said like, how can I show this work? And what I thought is that each of these images or each of these pages was actually a moment in time. I decided to collect them into volumes, into books.

Claudia de la Torre

Each book represented one day, each day containing a hundred copies. That is the moment I thought like, yes that's it! - it's condensed. A book is time, and memory, it's an archive. All of these topics that I was interested in summed into that work. Since then I've been captivated by those ideas and working on them.

Leonardo Bravo

That so interesting that this object can contain these bigger ideas of memory, of seriality, of a kind of time based sequence, and how we capture an image or not capture it, and those traces of it. And like you said, a book can be almost like that perfect vehicle or vessel for those really big concepts.

Claudia de la Torre

Exactly. And also the fact that the copy, like this book, would exist just one time, because it wouldn't make sense to replicate them. They're unique. One of a kind. They just exist one time, because there's just one time when this loss of ink happens. To me I was already thinking of what does it mean to make an edition, how many books to make, why is it okay when there's just only one or why should we reproduce them more times? So all of this decision-making, let's say, stayed in my head every time I was thinking about making a book.

Leonardo Bravo

Let's fast forward into more of the present moment and this exhibition that you recently had at Miriam Gallery in New York. The title of the exhibit being "Palimpsest". Can you share with us your thinking about it, to hear what you were attempting to do, because it almost seems like there's a through line from what you described from your earliest sense of using books.

Claudia de la Torre

This was the latest exhibition I had at Miriam Gallery in NY in June 2022, and it was my first solo show in the United States.

Claudia de la Torre

I was invited to do whatever I wanted to, and I was thinking, what if I make a work that wouldn't exist without other people being part of it? What would happen when I would extend an invitation and I would come up with instructions for it, and my work would manifest by giving the conditions and the tools that are needed for the installation to actually happen? So that was the main idea. I'm always thinking about when does a book start and when does it end? And when is a book an archive or when is a book the work or the end result of the work? Let's assume the brain of my work is always the book and it doesn't matter which way I take, I always end up there in a certain way. For this show, I thought about using basic materials and prompts for engagement. Going back to Black Snow where I used a photocopy machine as the main tool, so a black and white photocopy machine. And then I made twelve tools and these tools were letter sized plexiglass plates depicting different shapes that I had extracted from previous books I've published in the past. Also a set of instructions, a time stamp, and steel fixtures. I wanted to create an installation that was living. In flux, constantly changing, building up, and deconstructing itself throughout the eight weeks of the show.

Leonardo Bravo

So people could actually take these acrylic plates and sort of rearrange them, according to a set of rules, or just starting with the rules as a set point?

Claudia de la Torre

So the acrylic plates are transparent, which allows the public to place them on the photocopier bed and play with the way they make compositions. They had then to make two copies. One to place on the steel fixtures and another to be built upon by the following participant.

Leonardo Bravo

Amazing.

Claudia de la Torre

The work is called Palimpsest - which is actually a living history, containing narratives written, erased, layered, built upon, and gone over time leaving the previous elements as ghosts. In the past, people would write on parchment. It was so expensive that eventually, they would have to erase whatever was written on it and reuse it, and all of these layers of meaning, all of these layers left behind - that's a Palimpsest.

Claudia de la Torre

I wanted to take on that idea where the work is that sense of layers building. Let's say you start off by making one composition, following the instructions, you have to make two photocopies, one that goes on the metal structures in the room and the second one that serves as a starting point for the second person. One composition then is a link to a longer chain, one depends on the previous. And it starts to replicate and change and variate from one to the other.

Leonardo Bravo

That's fascinating because then those variations could be infinite. Starting from a set of rules but ultimately it's almost rhizomatic the way these forms and patterns can mutate grow, expand.

Claudia de la Torre

Exactly. And it's always site-specific because it adapts to the space, but it also depends on the public. Once I had the exhibition going and flowing, it was really, really great and by the end of the exhibition I had so many, I still have to get them back around 250 copies.

Leonardo Bravo

I love how you consider this work to be a living organism, that Palimpsest is always, is ever growing.

Claudia de la Torre

It's ever-growing. And this idea of open works or things that could repeat themselves, but also change is something that's always a constant. I like to think about concepts that are not just unique and that are set in stone, but things that can actually mutate and change depending on the context and the time where it's been made.

Leonardo Bravo

You’ve spoken about Fluxus as a reference and influence, that really gives an opening to your work, and it creates this context, this sense of almost chance encounters. That there's a predetermined model, but also that the model itself creates so much room for chance encounters, iterations, regeneration throughout the life of the project.

Claudia de la Torre

Definitely, and also always having in mind that a book as a medium needs an active user. The 250 copies will be published in an Artist's book. An installation that ends up being a book. A work of its own. It was important to me not to forget how Miriam operates. It is a space in which contemporary art and books coexist. Books exist in the same space as the exhibitions. Not in a back room, or an alternative space behind the gallery. So I wanted palimpsest to work a loop, it's a circle. It starts…

Leonardo Bravo

There.

Claudia de la Torre

Right? Yes. And it ends up on the shelves, in the same space where it was made So it's like closing that circle, and then it leaves the gallery space, the book leaves the space and takes on another life, takes on another way of operating. That’s one of the reasons I find books so fascinating. They live their own life after you publish them. They have multiple owners and start to operate in different ways and reach other people and other places. An extended life.

Leonardo Bravo

It's really profound to think of these aspects of your work. I was just reading something about it and it's in the context of how you put forth this idea of how is knowledge of the world organized, classified, and archived, and what are the underlying systems of knowledge around that? Can we talk a little bit about another work that I find so intriguing called Cities in Fight or the Satellite Variations? I think it's from 2016.

Claudia de la Torre

Yeah, so this work is a pivotal work in the way I think and the way I've constructed work afterward. It starts off with one book which was written by James Blish called Cities in Flight, a science fiction novel. I wanted to work with science fiction because it is a literary genre that allows other parallel things or worlds to exist. I was thinking I wanna make a work that actually gravitates around it. It is a satellite, something that is not the thing, but that goes around the thing.

Claudia de la Torre

I had to take this to the limit. When I first started creating the work, I thought, oh my God, this is the most stupid thing I've thought about, but I have to take it to the limit to see if it works or not. In order to build a satellite around this book, I need to build it both visually, and verbally. This work has to do with the instructions or rules that anyone else could replicate. It's a process that I could even say, everyone could do their own in a way. I decided to select one word per page for each of the pages in the novel. The selection would happen by folding the page.

Claudia de la Torre

So by dog-earing, the page creates a triangle that points to the specific word. Word by word a new story is told. A story that actually makes sense. A parallel story that goes around the main story. But what happens if you fold the same corner, but to the other side of the page? What happens is that you have a random selection. A side B to the story. It is always hard to show books in an exhibition. Books are a one-to-one meeting in direct relationship with the viewer. It's something very intimate that demands attention and time.

Claudia de la Torre They don't spend three hours reading the book. They flip through it and that's it. So I was thinking, about how to show the work in an exhibition space. I had the chance to show it in Rinomina, an artist-run space in Paris. For this occasion, I recorded both, sides A and B into an LP. First of all, because an LP is a satellite in itself, it goes around, and it also has a side A and a side B. So there is this parallel between the formal aspect of the record itself. It has one side that makes sense, and the other side that makes no sense, it loops on itself.

Claudia de la Torre

I've shown this work twice. First in Paris and then in einBuch.haus in Berlin. For that occasion, I made the work available to a wider audience by publishing side A of the story as an affordable edition. I made an iteration of the original book. I allow the work to exist in different itterations and forms. Constellations, let's say.

Leonardo Bravo

I love this notion of constellations because in thinking about your last project in New York, it is highly choreographed. There's a great sense of I would say thought and choreography and understanding how these forms and patterns begin to unfold, but then also creating that additional room. And then I was looking at how you use the corners, and looking at this color topology, the site-specific mural, which is, described as acrylic paint on wall. It's interesting how much these visual forms can exist and breathe, have that breathing space to exist on their own. I think there's a lot of play in those moves, that you're really using advantageously.

Claudia de la Torre And that it allows me to repeat it and make variations depending on the room I exhibit in! And that work, to me it's also a book. A page of a book on the wall. But even if it's out of context from the formal idea of the book, that's what I want to broaden, broaden the idea of what a book is and maybe expand it and not just have it in book form. So, so, so I guess that is the freedom that I can take as a visual artist that perhaps I couldn't have if I were a designer. To open up completely different ways of understanding printed media or publications.

Claudia de la Torre

I want to find ways to expand things and show my work. I have to say that it has been a long road for me. With backbonebooks, for example, which is an important part of my practice. It's already 10 years for backbonebooks and I've published 78 books, which is quite a lot. But having this publishing project as a platform made me question my position as an artist. Can I actually free myself from that? I use backbonebooks as an alter egos, as something else that exists outside of me as a person.

Claudia de la Torre

It also allows me to make work that can be in a multiplicity of spaces. In and out of the exhibition space. One thing can exist without the other and they can meet again, there are some crossing points between all of these areas or ways of making. I love that idea. I love the idea of someone finding a book of mine somewhere in some secondhand shop and encountering one of the books I’ve made and thinking - what is this? Books don’t even have to be labeled as art, you can them in many different contexts altogether. I find that fascinating.

Leonardo Bravo

It's going back to what you spoke about this sense of memory through the stamp collecting with your dad. It made me think of when I was a little kid, we spent about four months living in Buenos Aires. It was magical encountering this city full of memory, history, and secrets. And most of that was conveyed by such a rich book culture. There were so many book stores and bibliotecas and magazine stands and kiosks and everything was like a process of discovery of new stories and mysteries being conveyed through the page. You know, it was almost like record hunting in that sense, but with books again, each one being like that one thing that you touch becomes a portal to something else.

Claudia de la Torre

I love that you say portal because that's exactly it. Yeah. It's a portal. That's, that's exactly it.

Leonardo Bravo

I'm glad I found the right word!

Claudia de la Torre

That's a really, really great word. Right now I'm actually reading a book by a Spanish writer, Irene Vallejo, called El Infinito en Un Junco. It goes throughout the history of book making, like from the beginning, from the papyrus to the invention of the alphabets and libraries and she goes through a whole scope of historical references and significant points. And there's one specific passage in the book which I really enjoyed, and I read it this morning because it ties it back to memory. And so she wrote that Jorge Luis Borges who I actually love of course, he said that books are the greatest invention of mankind and the most important one. I have the book here and I will try to translate it.

Leonardo Bravo

Why don't we just post in Spanish for our global readers!

“ de los diversos instrumentos del hombre el más asombroso es, sin duda, el libro. Los demás son extensiones de su cuerpo. El microscopio y el telescopio son extensiones de su vista; el teléfono es extensión de la voz; luego tenemos el arado y la espada, extensiones de su brazo. Pero el libro es otra cosa: el libro e una extensión de la memoria y de la imaginación.”

Leonardo Bravo That's really profound because it also connects to what you were saying a little bit about science fiction, that it can be a speculative genre that it transports you into a sense of things being something else, or maybe the parallel or the mirror of our realities, you know, and this extension of realities is such a powerful vehicle.

Claudia de la Torre

Leonardo, that's the perfect end of our conversation.

Leonardo Bravo

You are right Claudia, this is a perfect endpoint for the conversation. So thank you Claudia. Thank you so much for the sense of generosity, openness, and sharing about your work!

*all images courtesy of Claudia de la Torre

https://backbonebooks.net/connect/