Partitura

Partitura is published on the occasion of the solo presentation by Silvia Bchli at Centro Botn, Santander, Spain in 2024. Bchli has created a score in eight movements for the exhibition space: a sequence of rhythmic groups of drawings or ensembles hung at different heights and intervals that, room after room, accrue meaning in their persistent accumulation. Each drawing and each set embodies a precious act of care and attention, of profound observation and reconsideration, in which the blank spaces are as important as the coloured forms. The publication reflects this rhythmic arrangement in its pages, respecting each composition of drawings presented on each wall, reproducing the changes of scale, the silences between shapes and the accumulations of textures, and thus becoming an experiential archive of the show. Since the late 1970s, Swiss artist Silvia Bchli has committed to drawing as a continuous practice that is deeply dependent on and entangled with her body and its movements, both within the domestic sphere and the landscape. Her drawings can be read as traces of sensorial records a walk on a field, a body that aches, a poem that triggers and corporeal gestures the extension of the arm, the strength of the hand or the rhythm of the brushstroke. In this book, we find an essay by poet and art critic Quinn Latimer that presents Silvias practice as a somatic performance; a text by writer Chris Fite-Wassilak which narrates Silvias work as evidence of a rooted and daily practice, and finally a conversation between Bchli and Brbara Rodrguez Muoz, curator of the exhibition, that brings us closer to the artists decision-making process.