Residency: April 13 to May 3, 2020
Mentor: María Inés Rodríguez
José Ruiz is a Colombian artist, living and working in Bogotá. He studied art and art history at the Universidad de los Andes. His artistic and curatorial practice revolves around working with archives of art, cinema, architecture and popular graphics. He has carried out projects for La Tertulia Museum in Cali, the CAPC Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, Odeon Space and the Biblioteca Luis A. Arango in Bogotá, among others.
In 2020, during the first quasi-global lockdown, tropical papers invited José Ruiz Díaz to its online residency programme from April 13 to May 3.
PRINTING TODAY was a collaborative project, consisted of printing on 7,000 sheets of paper, phrases (25 characters long) that started with the word “TODAY”. The (virtual) public was invited to send their reflections on their “present” reality. The artist-typographer printed several copies of each sentence and used them to wallpaper the exhibition rooms. José Ruiz had been in a “printing quarantine” at the Espacio El Dorado gallery in Bogotá, since the beginning of the official quarantine in Colombia. Every day, tropical papers published on IG the phrases sent by our followers and printed by José in red letters on white paper in a handcrafted printing press made for the occasion. Each poster was photographed in the garden, under the shade of a flowering Brugmansia tree or trumpet angels.
Special thanks go to Espacio el Dorado for having started and hosted this fantastic project and to the artist @se_hacen_publicaciones for his generosity in sharing it with all of us.
@espacioeldorado is a contemporary art gallery established in 2015 in the neighborhood of La Macarena in Bogotá, Colombia
POSTED: @tropicalpapers_15.04.2020 to 18.05.2020
