“Loved into oblivion”


In this little excerpt, from the wonderful book Medieval Bodies - Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, by Jack Hartnell, it is briefly mentioned how gestures of love - caressing, rubbing, kissing - can transform ink on into blank spaces of paper. Even though it may be unintentional erasure (”loved into oblivion”), it is encouraging our idea how erasure can be an act of care, something that we also see in the work Sans titre (figurants), 2009‐2016, by Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza.



︎ More on this topic: Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts by Kathryn M. Rudy