la (in)herencia de la ultima caligrafía del Buenos Aires
2024
ink on 54 sheets of letterhead paper
67.5 x 77 inches (171.5 x 195.5 cm); individual sheets 7.5"x11"

I found 54 yellowing sheets of my father's circa-1990 letterhead in a stack of office supplies I inherited upon his move back to Argentina. His was the last cohort required to learn calligraphy in high school at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in the 1950s. Despite some half-hearted attempts, I never learned the form, but his sadistically rigorous calligraphy teacher came up often. The surrealist game of exquisite corpse, using black ink and a single nib-pen across the sheets, was the only way to excavate the psychological underconscious of this mastery that could not be passed down.