Ruídos (Noise)

Driving, drawing, interference and lines

In February 2019 me and my partner, Matt, threw ourselves in an adventure: driving across South America from Rio de Janeiro to Uyuni in Bolivia and then to the Atacama in Chile, and back. We wanted exactly that, to have an adventure. We both love traveling, learning languages, experiencing cultures, getting to know people - really anything that might feed our creativity.

I was never a fan of the most beloved Brazilian holiday, Carnaval, and he hadn't experienced the glitter life yet so we left Brazil in our car for what was supposed to be a month away trip right before the samba started in Copacabana.

Having met in Chile exactly a year earlier and knowing that Matt had driven from Santiago to Rio de Janeiro once already, we felt pretty confident about our adventure, maybe a little bit too confident. Starting from "We solemnly swear not to get farther than a 4 hour walk from any road" to finding ourselves in the middle of mountains and sand choosing which of the 20 tire tracks to follow or which rock was too big to drive over, we made our way to almost all the places we intended to. We slept under the stars, lost signal on Google Maps, realized that road had never actually been on Google Maps (was that even a road?), watched packs of red flamingos flying, solitary running llamas and lurking screaming donkeys, cried from being too cold (me), made many fires (him), broke the 4 hour walk promise many times, got lost in the fog, learned not to drive recklessly on gravel and that quicksand can look a lot like the perfect place to park and camp.

On the many, many days Matt spent driving, I drew. I wanted to register that trip, and even though I used all the memory on my phone with photos and videos, and we ran through I don't know how many memory cards on Matt's camera, video camera and drone, it didn't feel enough. I wanted to be part of the register more than for just my not so stellar photography skills. I wanted to register the time because I knew it would be over. I know time runs, I know moments become memories and memories become feelings of sort of something, so more than just time I wanted to register the space, and the way we moved through it as time moved through us. And so the lines started.

What's more linear than time, right? We come to existence, realize ourselves as beings with wills and wants, and we set for a straight line in that one perfect direction. Then a bump, a curve, a sudden stop, and the line is not so straight and clean anymore. The line actually tends to get pretty messy. But there are no do-overs, there's only trying again. And again. And I did, the pen went to one side, slid on a curve, came back sunk on a little hole, to the left and we're breaking, to the right and asphalt no more. I made 31 drawings and each one tells me about the place where we were when that time passed. In each line there are colorful sunsets, sand blowing - close-the-windows-fast!, emus running in the horizon -had never seen emus in my life!, snow on the top of the mountains - isn't it summer?, a beautiful blue lake at the end of the drive - so says the map.

The most curious part of that process is that the drawings I love the most are the ones where no line is straight, the ones where there was no road to follow, where every direction was possible. When deciding where to go had everything to do us, and nothing whatsoever with what others had already done I understood that paved roads might be stable, easier to drive, faster, safer even, we can never find uniqueness on paved roads, though.

(We ended up staying away for almost three months, we were almost denied exiting Chile, yes, I said exiting, our car broke down, was fixed and broke down again, but fortunately we can always find shelter and cariño in our Chilean "parents", who came for our rescue the moment they knew we were in trouble - I'll come back for that story, promise.)

Some of the 31 drawings that became the collection I call Where To. They were made with China Ink on paper and on each one I wrote the number of the road, the cities we were driving from and to or the county or state we were in, whatever information I had, as a way to place the lines with the geography I see in our pictures and videos.

Although none of the originals will ever be sold, they mean too much to me, I chose three of them to make prints. If you want to share my visual journey, you can find the links for them below.