Partitura, Silvia Bächli

Partitura is published on the occasion of the solo presentation by Silvia Bächli at Centro Botín, Santander, Spain in 2024.

Bächli has created a ‘score’ in eight movements for the exhibition space: a sequence of rhythmic groups of drawings or ‘ensembles’ hung at different heights and intervals that, room after room, accrue meaning in their persistent accumulation. Each drawing and each set embodies a precious act of care and attention, of profound observation and reconsideration, in which the blank spaces are as important as the coloured forms. The publication reflects this rhythmic arrangement in its pages, respecting each composition of drawings presented on each wall, reproducing the changes of scale, the silences between shapes and the accumulations of textures, and thus becoming an experiential archive of the show.

Since the late 1970s, Swiss artist Silvia Bächli has committed to drawing as a continuous practice that is deeply dependent on and entangled with her body and its movements, both within the domestic sphere and the landscape. Her drawings can be read as traces of sensorial records – a walk on a field, a body that aches, a poem that triggers – and corporeal gestures – the extension of the arm, the strength of the hand or the rhythm of the brushstroke. In this book, we find an essay by poet and art critic Quinn Latimer that presents Silvia’s practice as a somatic performance; a text by writer Chris Fite-Wassilak which narrates Silvia’s work as evidence of a rooted and daily practice, and finally a conversation between Bächli and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, curator of the exhibition, that brings us closer to the artist’s decision-making process.

Based in Berlin and founded in 2011, BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE is a small independent publishing house — a community of artists, graphic designers, authors, curators, cultural workers, craftsmen and craftswomen; specialising in artist books that are conceptualised as a part of an artwork or as the artwork itself.  They attempt to play with the format of the book and reflect its medium;  all of their books are produced in close collaborations with the artists themselves. Working in the long-standing tradition of alternative publishing practises, their focus is on collaborations with younger, not yet established artists or artists from outside of North America and Western Europe; from outside of an eurocentric discourse.

BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE translates to ‘good day, good afternoon, good night’ in Portuguese. The name conveys the idea that books can become an integral part of our everyday life – regardless of the time of day. 

Measures: 18.5 x 25 cm
Pages: 304
Binding: Softcover