Opening: Thursday, October 23th, 5 p.m Exercises in Making a Place emerges from a research project focused on paper, a light and delicate material that nonetheless possesses a remarkable capacity to generate spatialities. Julia Levstein’s work takes drawing as its essential point of departure, expanding into writing, video, sculpture, and objects to trace her movements between countries and cities, investigating the qualities, singularities, and distinctions of the territories she traverses. Along these itineraries, the transitions and exchanges between the urban and the domestic, the street and the home, the private and the public serve as symbolic materials through which she seeks to create her own places. Here, newsprint acts as an object that connects these spaces, recreated with functions that go beyond news and reading, assuming new roles as a worktable, a tool, an image, a material, or a context. In other dimensions of paper’s lightness, a set of pieces functions as prototypes of domestic furniture—chair, table, armchair, bookcase—designed to be unfolded in space by a group of people. Made entirely of paper, they lose tension if not held, dismantling their illusion of volume. When at rest, the pieces appear as soft, ephemeral sculptures, containing the potential to be activated at any moment and reveal the qualities of their form. This lends the work a performative character, as its realization necessarily relies on collaboration.
Image: Julia Levstein