Grafía Callada (Hushed writing)
This project originated with the idea of constructing a book in which not a single intelligible word appears. A book with all the classic sections, but without a phonetic or grammatical reading, that is, one that can only be "read" graphically. My initial intention was to achieve a deconstructed view of the book, to be able to separate content and form. A book is something more than a sum of pages filled with text. A book is also a sequence of planes, of surfaces, on which the printed areas, whether text or image, are composed and arranged, taking on their own values and constructing their own language. This new view of the book, this separation of form and content, is the central focus of the project. It all began with an invitation from Raquel Pelta to take part in the exhibition Sin Límites at the end of July 2002, when I was getting ready to go on holiday. This circumstance was decisive in the shaping of the project, influencing the choice of working material and playing a part in making the project detached, since no kind of technology was available to me. This was the origin of the first pages, which I produced in the summer of 2002 and which appear in groups distributed throughout the book. Later, at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003, I started to apply the concept of deconstruction –separating content and form– to essential elements of a book: typography and writing, and also the sign. At that point I had found the thematic content. As can be seen, it was not a predefined project or one thought out in its entirely a priori, but rather it developed and found its direction gradually in the course of time. I continued working with these concepts until the summer of 2003, when this enlarged view which I had applied to writing and the sign opened up and expanded to take in more general, global aspects. Thus I began to work on the structures of writing and its codes: rhythm, order, sequence and pattern. These exercises led me towards other forms of representation close to writing. I became interested in the languages of geometry and music, the representation of sound and cartography. At the end of the summer of 2003 this situation culminated in the making of the final pages, concluding the book with the theme of painting as representation. The result has surprised me because of the expressive capacity and poetic power that the material acquires once it is placed and evaluated on the page, and because it clearly shows certain essential functions of the designer: arranging, ordering and sequencing.
The process
The Book
The exhibition
The work
