As part of her approaches to the production of knowledge, the understanding of the world and the classification systems, Mariana Castillo Deball has developed an interdisciplinary working method that she calls "diagonal methodology", which comes from the "diagonal sciences" developed by the French thinker Roger Caillois (1913-1978).
Caillois was a philosopher and essayist who, together with Georges Bataille, founded the French College of Sociology, which brought together a group of intellectuals who sought to dismantle the canons of Western thought through texts and conferences characterized by great scholarship and radicalism. As the artist herself writes, with the “diagonal sciences”, Caillois proposes “a way of thinking that is not limited to disciplines or literary genres, but functions as a way of reflecting on the world from unusual connections, thus generating a generous and inclusive fabric of thought."[1]
In addition, the French thinker was a great rock collector, to which he dedicated the book 'Stones' in 1970, which explores endless visual and cultural aspects of stones and minerals from a playful and open perspective. In the prologue to this literary essay, recognized for its poetic and speculative nature, he wrote: “I do not try to recognize species, but to make the force of a fascination perceptible. In this somewhat hallucinated vision that animates the inert and goes beyond what is perceived, it has sometimes seemed to me to capture one of the possible births of poetry live.”[2]
Drops of Water Drip consists of a site-specific mural that is inspired by a photograph of a cross-section of an agate stone, which is part of the collection of the Natural History Museum in Paris, where the Roger Caillois stone collection is housed. Painted on the wall and on a large scale, the work functions as a kind of homage to the French thinker, through whose ideas Castillo Deball has been able to playfully investigate in different ways how knowledge is constructed.
EKA, July 2020
https://1995-2015.undo.net/it/argomenti/1351450010
https://issuu.com/neputns/docs/studija87
http://www.barbarafaessler.com/files/87-Studija-BarbaraFesler-30-36-lpp.pdf
https://letralia.com/lecturas/2017/02/11/piedras-de-roger-caillois/
Uncomfortable Objects. Mariana Castillo Deball, Berlín, Bom dia, 2012, 152 p.
[1] Uncomfortable Objects. Mariana Castillo Deball, Berlín, Bom dia, 2012, p. 35.
[2] Quoted in https://letralia.com/lecturas/2017/02/11/piedras-de-roger-caillois/
As part of her approaches to the production of knowledge, the understanding of the world and the classification systems, Mariana Castillo Deball has developed an interdisciplinary working method that she calls "diagonal methodology", which comes from the "diagonal sciences" developed by the French thinker Roger Caillois (1913-1978).
