Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The FOLD & UNFOLD Workshop was an experimental and didactic instance that test the idea of “thinking by doing” through the fold in paper and its potentialities for the production of form and figure. The role of paper in history is fundamental, first in writing, then in the printing press and with it, in the fixation of language in space, the history of ideas, dissemination, fixation, democratization, massification and globalization of them. This laminarly preformed material can also be approached from its condition of almost two-dimensional laminar material with memory, since it evidences the footprint-patrimony- through the simple act of FOLD AND UNFOLD. Paper, too, through one of its inherent actions, is structural, allowing volumetrizing from a laminar abstraction, moving from the 2D sheet to 3D, from the plane to the space / form, revealing in passing the main input of visual perception: light. The fold reveals the light and the light shows the forms. The fold can be described in the complexity of mathematics, but retains the truth of the matter, its physical condition shows the truth beyond the symbol that calculates and describes: now we are speaking of the fold as geometric-morphological congruence. Conversely, it also suggests ways of thinking from physics, as, for example, the folded space / time conception or the fold of thought, as a recursive action, for many, that defines our human condition.