Fingers, Unfolding the Line

NATHALIE ALFONSO

b. 1987, Colombia

Fingers, Unfolding the Line, 2020

Video Still (White chalk on glass)

Courtesy of the artist

Nathalie Alfonso produces artworks that present notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance. While these artistic gestures often take place in the public sphere, Alfonso’s works examine the intimate and internal domains of domestic work and the female body.

In the artist’s words:

Fingers (Unfolding the Line) is a film where I toggle between drawing a line in. Framing and extreme close-ups of my hand performing the motions of drawing. Utilizing a wax pencil to record the marks of my fingers, I highlight the focal point of the subconscious hand and the various pressures of my fingers and attempt to disregard the mechanisms of my internal autopilot. The video served as a self-reflexive object of study, where I was interested in the specificity of my mark-making, abstracted and viewed in the third-person. Through this action, I considered for the first time “my hand” versus “the hand” and worked to blur the identity of the body and distance any notion of its visible labor.