This artwork is a powerful sample from an early series by the Latin American artist, Tatiana Parcero. In the series Cartografía Interior the artist uses mapping to explore connection. The body, here an image of the artist’s hand, is foreground to a colonial map. Impossible to decipher when depicted online, these images are on two separate print layers. These layers are meant to be mounted and framed with space between them, so that the foreground layer of the body, rendered on a transparent acetate in black and white (or black and “clear”). One layer floats over the other, creating the illusion of volume with space. Light casts shadow, and this invisible mark enhances the overall effect. Even without contact there is engagement. This choice is beautiful and metaphoric.

This photographic artwork appeared in the exhibition catalog, Revolution and Ritual, The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero. Though it did not appear in the exhibition itself, its relevance to the artist’s oeuvre is underscored by Esther Gabara in the following passage:

The corporeal and abstract, present and ruptured body that recurs throughout Parcero’s work is the fundamental connection between the codex and the viewer. Although she usually works with her own body, Parcero does not view her work as autobiographical. It is, she explains, a familiar and easy-to-control tool to make the visual intervention that most interests her. That tool, in this case, permits her to project the imagination of a social structure in which the human and the natural world connect and coexist rather than operate as fundamentally different realms. In Cartografía #36, the winding paths of the Map de Teozacoaloco (ca. 1577) introduce color to the black-and-white image. Their blue and red roads echo medical illustrations of veins and arteries that Parcero also includes in this series and in “Universus;” the paths of human level on the earth become the internal transit of blood in the body.