Guga Szabzon

Travesía Cuatro presents Not every journey is straight, an exhibition by Guga Szabzon.

Guga Szabzon hand traces maps of palpable impressions, dreams and recollections. Her practice is driven by the desire to map the course of different actions that constitute lived experience: from the sensation of an atmospheric phenomenon to imagined landscapes. Szabzon’s poetics arise from dealing with the boundaries between writing, sewing and drawing. In her work we encounter accounts of poetic writing, drawings, collages and the documentation of everyday events.

Trembling is the sewing machine’s physical state. The speed and automatism of the machine merge in a gesture that is as contingent as it is reflexive, which can be understood as an embodied practice. The forms, the words and the actions, vibrate. Like maps, that allow uncertainty around experience to linger beyond semantics, unstitching the illusory unambiguity that fascinates us in definitions and in delimitations. Yet, while the movements of the lines frustrate our hopes of conventional and prosaic order, the apparent disorder found in its place does not imply anarchy but a shifting between supposedly contradictory forms of order: from tension to extension, form to formless, from necessity to freedom.

“You continue ahead. Fall into a hole. Get up. A fork. You choose the left, go back and that path no longer exists”, writes the artist in her notebooks. It is within this cosmos-chaos that the game is established between sense and nonsense. Thus, it is through alterations between oneiric and reflexive states that her works leave open the possibility of wandering between various orders. In this sense, Guga Szabzon’s work is expressed as much in the movement of the lines and dashes, as in what lies between them.

— Travesía Cuatro