Asor (limited edition)

Graciela Iturbide
Manuel Rocha Iturbide and Christina Kim / dosa

With secrets drawn from her archive, Graciela Iturbide creates a curious world in which the human subjects we encounter in her widely-known portraits are absent. In Asor, the human subject is the reader alone, dream borne, on a journey in which all places remain nameless, time cannot be ascertained, and the course is lost to the imagination. Loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Iturbide constructs her intimate homage to Lewis Carroll’s classic tale without words, making use of the narrative as well as formal elements of her photographs to take her readers on a fantastic journey that can unfold only in print.

Accompanying the visual work are six electroacoustic works by composer Manuel Rocha Iturbide. Composed over a fifteen-year period from 1990 to 2005 from sources taped by Rocha Iturbide during his extensive travels, the compositions were selected by the composer in response to his mother’s photographs.

For the limited edition of Asor, Christina Kim / dosa has created a textile envelope using remnants and off-cuts from dosa clothing lines. The reversible envelopes are hand-spun, hand-woven, organic hill cotton on the outside and habutai silk on the inside. The design is inspired by the patchwork of the nomadic Banjara of India, particularly their lively traditional bags and sacks that are made from scraps of old textiles and used to carry all of one’s possessions during a life of continuous movement. Asor is similarly constructed from a lifetime of gathered experiences – many points along a continuous journey – that are stitched together to create something new. The textile enclosure for the special edition was hand-embroidered in India by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad and sewn at dosa in Los Angeles.

Read more under “Technical Details”.