The Body of the Line: Notations on Drawing, by Edith Derdyk
The Body of the Line: Notations on Drawing, by Edith Derdyk

By Tatiana Eskenazi*

I came by the difficult path,
the line that never ends,
the line hits the stone,
the word breaks a corner,
minimum empty line,
the line, a whole life,
word, my word.
Paulo Leminski

In the beginning, there was the line. From the first human trace, recording the gesture, to the elaboration of language. Even before the human: the line that gives shape to the world. Starting from a paradox, “how can a continuous line of a single dimension be a body?”, and in paradoxes lies an immense creative potential, in his new book The body of the line: notations on drawing, the artist and writer Edith Derdyk follows a path that is not linear, but follows a thread around the line and its infinite possibilities, and proposes a sensitive and in-depth investigation into the act of drawing.

The book is organized as a collection of fragments (short essays, aphorisms, images and provocations) that are connected by a common thread: the line. This line, however, is not only formal. It is also existential. “The line is the conductor of an experience that passes through the body, it is a territory of transit between the inside and the outside”. It is no wonder that at times we have the impression that it is a great poem, a manifesto, or an artist’s book. 

And if the body of the line is the hand that stitches, this is what the author does. The line as a process, in a continuous stitching, “the taste for the path without a destination”. The intention is to exhaust the line in all its possibilities — even if this is impossible. “And, because it is unattainable, it drives the eternal desire for movement, the vocation of the line.” Because here, nothing matters more than the process, the investigation, from the archaeology of the line to new ways of seeing and tracing possible futures.

Articulating references from different areas — philosophy, literature, visual arts — to delve deeper into his thinking, we are led by a chorus of authors, artists and thinkers along the way. Foucault, Deleuze, Deligny, Simondon, Ponty, Valéry, Lispector, Mario de Andrade, Fernando Pessoa and many others appear as voices that intertwine with his reflection, giving body or helping to construct this moving body of the line. These references, however, do not impose themselves as authority: they are shared as companions on the journey, in a collective construction. “It is not a quote that justifies, but a quote that pulsates, that vibrates together”.

Em The body of the line, Derdyk proposes to think of drawing as a form of sensitive and intuitive knowledge. More than a technique, drawing is presented as an experience of the body, a gesture of thought and a way of inhabiting the world. “Drawing is not just tracing, it is inscribing oneself, it is a way of listening, a way of being present”. Drawing as the oldest language, “so old and so permanent that it crosses the arc of civilizations, our collective coexistence.” 

One of the central ideas of the book is that the body is present in every drawing gesture: “The entire body is at the tip of the pencil…” And not only the physical body, but also the symbolic, poetic, political body. “The line is the body in a state of thought. It is the body that thinks while it moves.” When drawing, we trace paths, create meanings, listen visually, and leave our mark on the world. 

Derdyk questions the traditional hierarchies that oppose word and image, rational and sensitive thought, theory and practice. “Drawing is not illustrative, it is constitutive. It does not represent, it presents.” He rejects the norms that imprison drawings and free thinking, which reduce our possibilities of inhabiting the world. “Escape from the submission of the gesture that, under the command of the gaze, sometimes subjugates all other senses to the information of the line as contour, and the resulting supposed fidelity to the referent, will be our learning here, our challenge.”

To guide us through this challenge of abandoning the idea of ​​line as contour, the fixed and static forms, inherited from the Cartesian line, the author proposes eighteen new possibilities of lines, each accompanied by quotations that trigger them: mud-line, immeasurable line, membrane-line, apparition-line, cartopographic line, drift-line, is-line, event-line, emancipated line, performative line, horizon-line, transitive line, erasure-line, nomadic line, projectile-line, phantom-line, web-line and destiny-line. 

The book also defends the power of manual work, of slowness, of attention to detail (practices that resist the fast pace of the contemporary world), and of the valorization of error as a power. “The errant line opens up possibilities. In this context, error is not a failure, it is a creative deviation.” The wavering stroke, the hesitant line, the interrupted gesture: all of this gains value as part of the process. Just like life, drawing is made of uncertainties. And that is precisely where its strength lies.

Finally, The Body of the Line is not just a book about drawing. It is a work about the gesture of existing with attention, curiosity and dedication. An invitation to listen, to move and to be present. As Derdyk says: “Drawing is the interval between the gaze and the gesture. It is the suspended time of the body that thinks”. Only with an attentive, present and curious gaze — dedicated to listening and moving — can we walk together. And only by walking together, in a collective construction, can we reach a place that interests us: new possibilities for the future.

*Tatiana Eskenazi (São Paulo, SP) is a photographer, poet and writer. She published the poetry books “Your portrait without you” (Quelônio, 2018) and “In the cigar’s carcass” (Laranja Original, 2021). She teaches literary courses and workshops and collaborates with magazines and newspapers.


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