Andrea Avendaño
Pentagrams of Silence

Andrea is a visual artist and art educator. Graduated from the School of Visual Arts (New York), she explored works on paper (engraving, drawing) from different perspectives, and manifested her social commitment to communities with low representation such as migrant children in New York City. In Buenos Aires, she pursued a Master in Art History degree and, thanks to the accompaniment of the anthropologist Guillermo Wilde, her thesis on how the Copy (drawing) can be a mechanism of cultural resistance in a marginalized school in South America. Since then, she advocates for the right that children have to live their own culture within schools, an issue she has developed with the Mapuche people in the South of Chile. This work is based on a hypothesis that the artist affirms, which is that images can be the means to reactivate an oral culture, prioritizing the production of them over the exercises of reading and writing within the schools.

About Pentagrams of Silence (by Andrea Avendaño)

My drawings have always been a form of communication that is determined by another logic, they go through poetry, letters, maps, but above all, they encircle and enter the void, in those invisible places that nobody wants to rescue. The fact is that the line acknowledges our spaces of life.

The Pentagrams of Silence are originally born from drawing and musical writing. I dedicated myself to thinking about the written fixation of the rhythms, of the maps in dance, in the drawings in the air. Of all that, there were turns, sounds and movements that left no trace and that were the most powerful memories. This is how I get to create Pentagrams of Silence, they narrate gestures that haven’t left a trace.

This time at Fundación´ace, I have returned to engraving, but engraving without ink and honouring the paper. The paper is the support of a union: the un-pronounced word and its sound, just as in poetry the silences are an elementary part of the rhythm. Because the sounds respond to another logic, not that of the word, but to an invisible force. For example, the strength of my voice comes from the small amphitheaters that I carry in me, which are all my organs, to transform into words that, through my breath, fly infinitely. These pentagrams talk about that, but also announce all those words that were not said. This is why these matrixes play a sort of tanning on the paper. These pentagrams rattle distant loves, those that communicate without the need for translation. There are no analogues here, each space is free and unique. These pentagrams are free writing, and that is why they amplify the visual sense … that is perhaps one of their best values, because that is where life speaks differently and the words are silent…