& with Earth

patrick brennan
April 2023

This is a book that loves the hand, slightly over 8 inches square, whose photographically invoked textures invite fingertip and palm. Yet it is just a book, flat paper and ink, visually immediate and intimately approachable, imagined, catalogued and designed by NYC artist Flavia Bertorello, native to Cordoba, Argentina, with her Argentine collaborator Guido Grosso. It’s appropriately, and evocatively, entitled Body as Land, a stereolingual journey evolved through explorations she pursued in 2021 during a 3 month artist residency with Untethered Magic in Nairobi, Kenya.

Bertorello’s conflation of body as land, situates an orientation towards land itself as flesh, as skin, as nerve sensitive, sentient, emerging itself from a body of inner feeling and sensitivity, a leap of empathy with what might otherwise be routinely dismissed as inert and often unworthy of being perceived as alive. Her recognition of this kinship, a fact already in the most technical and literal sense indisputible but nevertheless still so often somnambulistically talked right out of evident existence, affirms an intimate equality of these entities and opens mindset toward another character of conversation and convergence.

I incorporate the environment into my own physicality, tuning the body with the electromagnetic field of the earth.

Yet, here, via camera, it’s the eye that engages this tactility, that launches image toward touch and contact.

Often enough, books functioning as documents of visual art practices may pose a forensic distance and detachment from what they aim, or claim, to represent, but Bertorello has instead made a point of rendering her book a work of art on its own terms, an experience in itself, thus executing and displaying a continuity of tone and intent throughout all of her modes of invention, thereby unraveling a continuous thread of imagination.

Traveling from one place to another has always triggered a search within me. In this particular experience, the environment motivated the production of the work and the research itself. In fact, during the residency, I devoted myself to engaging with the ground (soil) to the extent that I was no longer thinking but making. The new body of work came into existence and a book seemed the ideal media to integrate and share the material.

Viajar de un lugar a otro siempre ha impulsado una búsqueta dentro de mi. En esta experiencia especifica, el entorno mótivo la producción del trabajo y la investigación en si mismos. De hecho, durante la residencia, me dediqué a involucrarme con la tierra (el suelo) a tal punto que ya no estaba pensando, sino haciendo. Nació un nuevo cuerpo de trabajo y un libro parecia el medio ideal para integrar y conpartir el material.

The composition and pacing of Body as Land sweeps the reader/viewer into the sense of uncertainty presaged discovery that characterizes her creative process during this period. The choice of an understated black and white presentation over color concedes an emphasis toward texture that only further amplifies its overall sensuosity. She plays abundantly with frame, grain and surface nuance, imbuing nearly every page turn with jamais vu impressions of encountering each visual presence as if for the very first time—no matter how many times one may have already perused them.

There are diffuse landscapes that encompass the full page, abrupt, sharply delineated close-ups without borders, pages of pure black that are followed by full-on white, episodes of text, some fine, some demonstratively expansive, rows of squares on white surrounding circles of soil samples resembling pulverized pigment, sequences of smaller, rectangular bordered photos on white with captions, full page drawings, a range of grays.

En una instancia particular, utilicé todo mi cuerpo para desmantelar una pila alta de tierra alta volcánica de 4’ (1,25 m) dentro del shamba ( un área de jardin vallado de aproxidamente 50 ft2 ). Utilizando un motículo de tierra como apoya, puse todo mi cuerpo en el suelo, mientras me movia y respiraba en pleno contacto con la tierra y, a través de este proceso, reprisenté mi cuerpo como un espacio, con fronteras, centros vitales, bordes, debilidades y una armadura, como capa sobre capa.

In one particular instance, I used my whole body to dismantle a 4’ (1.25 m) tall pile of volcanic soil within the shamba (a fenced garden area of approx. 50 sq. ft.). Using a heap of soil as a prop, I engaged my whole body with the ground, moving and breathing in full contact with the soil, and through this process, I rendered my body as space, with frontiers, vital centers, borders, weaknesses and armor, as layer upon layer.

Purple bouganinvillea. Moss on stones. Cactus. Zebras. Passion fruit carcass. Giraffes. A bird nest in Olorgesaillie. Boscia senegalensis. Bottlebrush flower. A baboon basks in the sun.

Two horizontal rectangles each surround a pair of forefeet, toes caked with soil. Various organic material on the ground (body-soil interaction). Body as brush: soil pigments, egg yolk & water. Friction. A short meaningful interview with the artist. White typewriter font on black reads body: material enactment, traveled by breath / cuerpo: material de proclamación, territorio recorrido por la respiracion. Everything informs everything else.

This is a book that remembers, reminds itself and reawakens. It suspends blinder focused, goal driven time so as to host wonder, to marvel, to appreciate, to realize. If its presence were an overwhelming one, its virtuosity might be hailed as tour de force, but this is rather a carefully savored weave of multiple entry points, of communications and interpenetrations, an enticing fermentation of potentialities. Hold this book on your lap, comfortably, turn its pages, and breathe.

For more information on Body as Land and the work of Flavia Bertorello →

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patrick brennan is a composing/improvising musician who lives in NYC. He writes about music, cinema, visual art & poetry.