Galerie VidalCuglietta

Lines of Escape. As a “user of space”, Mira Sanders develops her personal  “journal” step by step (pas à pas) and, rather than drawing up an “inventory” of space, she “invents” it. Using different media and methods, she  produces pictural, sound-tracked transpositions of a relationship with the  world consisting of encounters with other people and places. These are the  fruit of her journeyings near and far: from Brussels to Beirut, Charleroi to  Famagusta, Namur to Venice, via China… And as she goes, the artist takes  hold of the word “reality” in its plurality, even writing it into new phrasings.

Thinking of “these makers of portulans [illuminated parchment maps which  first appeared at the end of the 13th century showing a succession of ports  and havens, while the sea areas are webbed with geometrical lines corresponding to the points of the compass] who saturated the coastline with  names […] until land was separated from sea by a continuous ribbon of  text”, Georges Pérec pointed out that the discovery and conquest of new  parts of the world had to be accompanied by their own form of “graphie”.

In the collection of works she presents in Lines of Escape, Mira Sanders returns to this primary need to “describe space: name it, plot it…”. She exploits the potential of line as a tool for constructing a representation, giving  material form to the boundaries and areas of a surface or piece of land, as  a continuous feature, real or imaginary, separating two contiguous elements.  Line of force or line of flight, touch line, line of the horizon. They exist to  declare space and make it visible, so that one knows where one is and is  able, again, to cast off. 

Brigitte Aubry
Extract of the text Lignes de fuite, January 2013