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Sovereign of the Seas 1 & 2 / 2022 Installation: Cabinet and 2 collage on paper and paper clips ( photographs by Jorge del Pedregal, poems by Sofía del Pedregal, Found Postcard (translation to English Sofía del Pedregal) and Antarctica Treaty, 1961 print out. Group show 21st International Biennale Petit format de Papier, Belgium/France, 2022
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The collage works that I’m presenting for the 21st International Biennale Petit Format de Papier (Belgium / France) are part of a larger ongoing project titled Sovereign of the Seas. This multidisciplinary project includes collages, prints, drawings, photographs, collaborative videos, poetry, and artist’s books. The starting point of this project was a series of postcards that I found on my last visit to Argentina, where my mother is from, at a used books store. The postcards were mailed in 1993 by an Argentinian cruise ship waitress to her lover in Argentina. She shares her experience of excitement, loneliness, and exhaustion working 14 hours a day in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, on the ship called the Sovereign of the Seas. The translation of one of the postcards is part of one of the collages. Sovereign of the Seas became a frame to connect ideas and generate a multiformat visual and textual fiction around these postcards. The stamps on the postcards carry the design of the 1961 Antarctic treaty, which connects with the glacier drawings that I was doing before running into the postcards. Then, in the collages, I aim to generate a dialogue between fragments of the 1961 Antarctic treaty text, one postcard, poems, and pictures that my father, Jorge del Pedregal, took when he went to Antarctica. These collage works offer a place to engage, through a poetic language, with scattered ideas put together which reflect on contemporary Antarctica, territory sovereignty, and the intimate experience of loneliness.