When all goes and only loss and emptiness remains, of one thing we can be sure: the void will be covered in dust. In the last few years Elena del Rivero's done her fair share of poring and filtering through this most elusive of materials, with which she was confronted in her WTC-facing studio on Cedar Street on the morning after the attacks of 9/11. Instead of bringing out the hoover, Del Rivero mourned by plugging in a friend's camera and documenting the inside and outside of the premises in ninety hours of video footage. The result is a historical record, and the book she recently made by editing the footage to make a sort of slo-mo flip-movie of her studio's dust filled topography, a document of something akin to a performance, which she's titled 'The Book of Dust'.
Opening and closing the small volume are images of the workers at the WTC site, a reminder of the very concrete nature of the dust we are about to flicker through. When I met the Spanish-born, New York City-based artist a few months ago and started unconciously wiping clean the luxuriously gilt-edged, breviary like book's velvety white hard cover, I wasn't allowed. 'It's supposed to get dirty', the artist implored, and at that moment I realised it wouldn't take long to fulfil her desire. Soft as dust or like a sponge and ready to absorb traces of ambient grime and collect the touch of all those who contemplate its contents, mine is already looking pretty worn; it's not difficult to anthropomorphise an object whose materiality is so strongly connected to being human.
Del Rivero, who has a history of working with the idea of pervasive immateriality (you may have seen her project 'Sw:t' at New York's Drawing Center a few years ago), has previously articulated her interests in highy autobiographical process-based performance, scrapbooks and drawing projects that present a sort of laborious, and fading, delicacy. Two chances to catch up with her work at the moment: her recent show at IVAM and 'Darling', at the Elvira Gonzalez gallery in Madrid (to 30 Dec 2007).
Still from one of Elena del Rivero's drawing projects
From Del Rivero's current exhibit in Madrid.
Click here to listen to an interview with the artist on portalatino.com
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez is a writer/editor based in London and Madrid.
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