Katrin Gattinger has carried out a number of actions, including working the area where the fields of drawing and performance meet. One has to do with the spatialization of a form and the other with granting that spatialization its capacity to be an event, and in this their meeting point becomes the point of political commitment by way of the graphic gesture.
At Rosa Brux Gattinger is showing a dual project that lays the foundation for her current work. First, she is going to do a performance, without an audience though, which she first did in Strasbourg on 26 August 2013. The date corresponded to the adoption of the last article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789. On that day in 2013, the artist went from one consulate to the next on a bike with a tracer affixed to the rear carrier, which reproduced each leg of her trip as a shaky line accumulating within the limits of a sheet of paper. At each stop along her route, she obtained the consulate’s stamp, proof of having finished that part of the trip. This drawing set is a document-producing graphic tool making visible the obstacles overcome via the identity of the asphalt (each irregularity in the ground is transcribed in the line). These route marks reference the political issues at stake in the international situation.
In Brussels, Gattinger will connect with as many embassies as possible in four days, an outcome that will be due as much to her physical abilities as to the scheduling constraints of these places and preliminary negotiations with officials. And along with presenting the drawings she has done during her residency, Gattinger will show, starting at 8:30 pm, a set of drawing devices that audience members will be invited to activate. What will visitors’ involvement in the project be? How will decisions be made in order to carry out the creation of the drawing? What will be the graphic objective and end of these drawings? While Gattinger generally works out all the details of her performances before doing them, here she will be flipping the process around and accepting that chance has some power over their implementation.