Nina Papaconstantinou
Autobiography of Red, 2018

30 × 35 cm
Unique
In Papaconstantinou’s drawn palimpsests, the artist copies, word for word and in multiple layers on carbon paper, Carson’s text, so that the final drawing produced is an imprint on the surface of the paper. The successive, repeated writings accumulate on a unified surface. (…) Each new layer of text refutes itself during the moment of its writing, since it is abolished by the next one that will follow, in a Sisyphean, laborious attempt to reproduce the text. (…) Papaconstantinou realized, following Walter Benjamin’s discovery, (…) that “of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them myself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method”; books, as she describes, “are written from the mind to the hand”, so that she can appropriate them and make them her own.
Excerpts, modified, from Tina Pandi’s text “Instead of Writing”, taken from In Present Tense, published by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece.