At the beginning of lockdown in 2020, Mexican photographer Paola Dávila explored diagrams of movement and “displacement of the body” in order to reconcile with the confinement of the early months of the pandemic. Using geographic metadata from mobile devices, she could construct a day-in-the-life as a continuous line of her own movement in her Constelaciones series. Printed as cyanotypes, these knotty lines present the movement of the body in a scaleless and geographically ambiguous way. One can imagine the space of the home (dense with back-and-forth movement) and contrast that confinement with the eccentric tendrils that suggest a walk outside or the rare cross-town trip. Floating in Prussian Blue, the lines invite us to project scale and space onto her movement and to rationalize their shape.

Cyanotype was a medium that Dávila had begun to explore the geographic potential of just before the pandemic. See two cyanotype studies from February 2020. In these, the crossing lines and intersections more obviously present themselves as movement at the scale of the city, like routes on a bus map. And, the specific geometry of these lines starts to look like neighborhoods or recognizable roads in Mexico City. With the Instagram hashtag “map” Dávila confirms our reading.

If these exercises began at a bigger scale, then the pandemic forced her to zoom-in. In a roundabout way, their combination explores the more interesting fusion of both room-sized and city-sized movement that exists in all our lives. And, since they use geospatial data to inform their shape, these clouds of yarn present an objective account of the habitation of space rather, as opposed to the hopeful lines-with-arrows that we architects so often use to diagram movement.

Dávila, Paola, Untitled Study, cyanotype, Mexico City, February, 2022, from the artist’s Instagram

The use of cyanotype is noteworthy. Dávila is a photographer by training, and the cyanotype process is a photo-sensitive one that uses Prussian Blue pigment. While cyanotype (discovered in 1842) can be used to develop photographs, the process never became popular for that use. Instead, it became popular as a process for reprography, specifically blueprints. Preceding other printing processes, blueprints allowed architects and engineers to limitlessly reproduce ink-drawings as photonegatives at the same scale as the original. Importantly, white-on-blue drawing made it difficult for future actors to alter the drawing, thus preserving an approved version. This comports with Dávila’s subject matter, as the linework of her Constelaciones is closer to that of technical drawing than a photograph, but the process fits within the heritage of the photographer.

One of Sir John Herschel’s original experimental cyanotypes revealing its original capacity as photographic print method (Herschel, Sir John, Experimental cyanotype of an unidentified lady with a harp, cyanotype, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, 1842, from Wikimedia Commons)

The title of the series (Constelaciones) works on two levels. Firstly, the deep blue background allows an abstract reading of the lines, indeed, as constellations in the night sky. But, as a lock-down exercise, the title hints a wider world and open space not accessible during the early months of the pandemic. Dávila’s series was featured at Edition No. 10 of the popular Mexico City art fair Salón Acme; taking place in February 2022, the art fair had been on a two-year pause since the beginning of Covid-19. In the feelings of the moment, the reopening of the fair seemed a milestone in the end of the pandemic, and Dávila’s cyanotypes were postcards from a distant-seeming lockdown.

Photocollage by the editors of Dávila’s exhibition space at Salón Acme No. 10, February, 2022.

Images below reproduced from the website of Dávila’s Gallerist: Patricia Conde Galeria. For more work: the artist’s website and Instagram.

7x above: Dávila, Paola, Constelaciones series, Cyanotypes on 200gr paper, 43x60cm, Mexico City, 2020

Constelaciones series / Paola Dávila / 2020 / Cyanotypes on 200gr paper, 43x60cm ea / Mexico City / Gallerist: Patricia Conde Juaristi

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: Since preparing this post in 2023, Dávila has broadened her exploration. The works in the Constelaciones series above are now described as Juegos or Games. She now considers these as studies for her more refined series Todos los días son lunes / Everyday is Monday which is even more explicitly focused on the movement of the body at a domestic scale but in specific relation to the pandemic’s tendency to compress work life into the home.