Sobre la lectura / 2014
Drawing and sound are constants in the work of Kevin Mancera, and two shared traits can be found in their production: long duration and an interest in traveling. His projects are structured around a physical journey (La felicidad, a travel diary comprising drawings made across Latin America of visits to places found on the map that are called "La felicidad" (“Happiness”). However, the literary journey has also proved constant in Mancera’s work, an artist wh understands drawing to be a tool of knowledge. In Walden (2013), Mancera hand copies Henry David Thoreau’s entire book of the same name (a diary about self-understanding as found through isolation in nature), creating an exercise that became one of confinement in his studio. In Cosas de viaje (2010), a project made as the result of a residency in Sao Paulo, he singles ou images that portray his experience of coming to know a new context, while in Sobre el fracas (2010) Mancera looks for stories about little-known characters whose projects, often absurd o delirious, failed to reach a happy ending, thus emphasizing the fact that one of the poetic dimensions of art (and of life itself) is failure.
Sound is also a feature of Mancera’s work thanks to a radio program that is streamed throug the internet. In the exhibition "Al aire" (2013), Mancera made drawings that related to each of the programs he had aired up to that point, revealing that his musical tastes are as eclectic a his interest in culture, which does not discriminate between "high" and “low”. In the presen project the audible and the literary journeys converge, and we are presented with what I considered to be a voyage into another voyage. The subject of study in this case is In Search o Lost Time by Marcel Proust, probably one of the most cited but least-read books in the histor of modern literature. In this performance piece, Mancera reads aloud, one by one, each of th seven volumes of this monumental work on existence and memory, recording the readings o cassette, an obsolete technology that, unlike its digital replacements, establishes a mechanica relationship between the capture of the voice and the materiality of the medium by tracing a (invisible) magnetic drawing on a tape, which is stored in a box, as its French name indicates This operation of image / sound / archive translation took up weeks of Mancera's time an work, and much of this work was done alone, which seems appropriate in the case of a work of Proust, for whom
José Roca.
Publication
Inside the exhibition was a handmade facsimile of Proust's beautiful text Days of Reading "sobre la lectura. (On reading)" in which he talks about the relationship of books with our lives and the relationship between the author and the reader through the reading.