Fijar la vista | Constanza Jarpa Luco

Fijar la vista. Cartografías del mundo impreso it is a graphic-editorial research project that delves into the procedures, materialities, and techniques of transferring images and texts onto two-dimensional media. This research began with the creation of an archive that collects, categorizes, and reuses photolithographic matrices and films discarded by printing companies in the Valparaíso region, the first city in Chile to receive a printing press in 1811. In an attempt to create an imaginary (and infinite) cartography of the printed world, the archive takes on various forms. the first of which gave way to the assembly of large-format mobile panels in which layers of textures, shapes, pieces of photographs, patterns, stains, and texts are joined together in the manner of collages mounted on photosensitive aluminum offset plates, which, when exposed to the sun and halogen light sources, allow the chemical transfer of the result to the metal. The next form has been the process of inking the plates to be printed using an engraving press on mercury and half-mercury format paper, which has so far resulted in eight different prints, four in large format and four in medium format. These prints led to the production of five plexiglas boxes containing four large-format prints, a piece of the aluminum plate used for printing, and a booklet with an artist’s text about the process. In addition, 50 copies of a publication with four medium-format prints were produced, enclosed in an envelope made from the aluminum offset plates and bound using Japanese stitching. The forms that this archive continues to take will serve as a map of the history of printed images and texts alongside transfer technologies that are gradually beginning to disappear.