The drawing reproduced here is part of a series created by Mexican artist Galia Eibenschutz in 1993. These drawings convey a sense of the transience and contingency of physical experience, qualities later expressed in the artist's more situational photographs and three-dimensional pieces. They are also a remarkable exercise in kinesthetic awareness. Describing her process, Eibenschutz writes: "The idea was to draw my memory of the feeling of my body in contact with the floor, so I used to take different positions and tried to translate into the language of drawing the sensation I was having. It was a way of "printing" my immediate memory ... an arbitrary translation of a feeling. It can be seen as a relation between the act of drawing, that is to say the pressure of the hand on the paper, and the feeling of the pressure of my body on the floor." FIGURE
![Figure](https://www.cmaj.ca/content/cmaj/162/9/1331/F1.medium.gif)
Figure. Galia Eibenschutz, 1993. Charcoal drawing, 80 cm × 1.20 m.
Eibenschutz was one the participants in c/o la Ciudad, an exhibition of works by seven young artists from Mexico City recently presented at Ottawa's SAW Gallery. Ranging from Yoshua Okón's Poli I (a videotaped confrontation with an irate policeman) to Jonathan Hernández' unassumingly elegiac SE BUSCA RECOMPENSA (Seeking Reward, a collection of "lost dog" posters) to Minerva Cuevas' Bar-code Stickers Service (a self-serve display of fraudulent barcodes to help ordinary citizens lower their grocery bills), the exhibition offered a rueful commentary on the adaptations necessary to survival in a congested and volatile city of 20 million. Eibenschutz's contribution, Sedentario(a) (Sedentary no. 1) was a three-legged wood and leather stool with attached seatbelt - a not entirely whimsical response to the long queues that are a daily fact of urban living.