xylography on birch wood
70 x 30 cm.
Apr. 2012
This is the fourth piece of a project which I developed during the year I stayed in Sweden as an erasmus. The project theme was identity: what makes a person different? what makes each person special? what is an identity made of? why do we have the need to be so unique, yet so integrated in a group? what do we use to define our identity? this are some of the questions that define the proyect.
I think it's quite interesting how each animal has it's own footprint, and by that you may be able to recognize what kind of animal it is. But what about humans? to begin with, we wear shoes, which makes us have lots of footprints and at the same time, they are all made of, because they are industrially produced. But the human signature on the world doesn't end up there, we've changed the world, built cities, destroyed forests. I think that is also the human signature on the world: how we have changed the world, building, destroying, polluting, croping, extracting...Nowadays there are really few places where you can go and find no human traces...This is the proof of the human identity, because we all are part of it, we step strong on the world, and leave our mark, deeper than any other animal.
The woodcut itself follows a lot the style of the ones of the Waste Project, it's a way of working that I really liked,the footprint was traced from one of my shoes.