the earth is flat

“The earth is flat”
Yohanna M. Roa
Individual Exhibition

The earth is flat is the title under which Colombian artist Yohanna M Roa proposes us to make visible a series of aspects linked to the map and the image attached to that place referred to in a cartography. The main relationship we will see in this set of visual works is a continuous questioning between the image and the text. That is, there are a number of aspects that are not said firsthand, which Yohanna has decided to put into dialogue: image and cotext. Considering that a cotext is a set of linguistic elements that include, proceed or follow a word and sentence that can determine its meaning or its correct interpretation.
The idea of ​​an atlas always brings images. Currently, the maps are even interactive and virtual. The routes we can make of certain cities and towns allow us to travel as spectators comfortably seated in front of a screen without having to move. The very idea that the earth is flat gives us a way to think about an ancient representation of the conception of a map.
At the beginning of cartographic design – towards the 15th century – the notion of what a map was was very limited. The cartography as a discipline did not have specialized content and was confused with the fantastic language of myths, unheard stories and fantasies that were not exempt from an overflowing imagination. Thus, contemporary art requires a conception of reference text, a “dry” discourse model from both theoretical and artistic perspectives in order to critically question the reality or realities that are proposed in any map.

Considering the above, Yohanna’s creative and artistic intentions are linked to the ability to question various disciplines such as anthropology, history and archeology, from which traditionally, images are integrated into linear narratives in particular to art history. , which has been built over the last 3 centuries.

There are two fundamental aspects that interest Yohanna, firstly the internal functioning of the works and secondly the processes by which those objects intervene (embroidery, cooked, engraved, linoleum stamps, pencil among others) that are often books, loose sheets, photographs, reproductions and prints. The interventions work as comments that are actually peripheral devices (of the image or of the text) what it intends to intervene is to bring out information that did not originally exist.

In other words, transform current images (some of them in art history) and propose a new order or dislocation with playful and arbitrary characteristics. For this reason, many of the images with which history books are involved through embroidery in some way seem absurd: a house, a cactus, an apple, a duck, all cross-stitched and with cotton yarn in different colors.
These embroidery actions build new maps on the images; stitches and embroidery refer to a new proposed fabric loaded with other possible senses. These tissues, like any product of human capacity, can be observed from two perspectives: the perspective of the processes (the activity of producing or understanding) and that of the product (the result of those activities). In addition, the fabric can be interesting from the point of view of the whole (the how what the embroidery is used for) or from the point of view of the specific fabric (the microstructure of art history: the way it is articulated, how certain stories are connected through small parts of each other). In this way, the artist can select, according to the findings of her gaze and her experience, the degree of complexity of the new image, created from the intervention of her embroidery. These parachutes of virtue, as they used to be called domestic embroidery, were activities of previous generations of women who were educated to be wives, mothers, but not artists.

The embroidery itself is considered as a craft. For this reason, it becomes interesting that Yohanna proposes stitches and embroideries intervened on science, art and biology books; The stitches and embroidery take the place of the words not spoken interpellated through the language of popular embroidery made by other women.

However, in spite of the different layers of meaning acquired by the works present on Earth, it is flat; We cannot say that there is a domestication of the artistic message. So it is rather a comment from that place, from the displacement of languages ​​recognized by art to generate messages. Yohanna intends to reconstruct the image present in her works with the needle and the son with whom she goes through the paper.