Partitura by Silvia Bächli

Partitura is published on the occasion of the solo presentation by Silvia Bächli at Centro Botín, Santander, Spain in 2024.

Bächli has created a ‘score’ in eight movements for the exhibition space: a sequence of rhythmic groups of drawings or ‘ensembles’ hung at different heights and intervals that, room after room, accrue meaning in their persistent accumulation. Each drawing and each set embodies a precious act of care and attention, of profound observation and reconsideration, in which the blank spaces are as important as the coloured forms. The publication reflects this rhythmic arrangement in its pages, respecting each composition of drawings presented on each wall, reproducing the changes of scale, the silences between shapes and the accumulations of textures, and thus becoming an experiential archive of the show.

Since the late 1970s, Swiss artist Silvia Bächli has committed to drawing as a continuous practice that is deeply dependent on and entangled with her body and its movements, both within the domestic sphere and the landscape. Her drawings can be read as traces of sensorial records – a walk on a field, a body that aches, a poem that triggers – and corporeal gestures – the extension of the arm, the strength of the hand or the rhythm of the brushstroke. In this book, we find an essay by poet and art critic Quinn Latimer that presents Silvia’s practice as a somatic performance; a text by writer Chris Fite-Wassilak which narrates Silvia’s work as evidence of a rooted and daily practice, and finally a conversation between Bächli and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, curator of the exhibition, that brings us closer to the artist’s decision-making process.