tinaja books

tinaja is a self-publishing project experimenting with the format of books as vessels by Virginia Ramírez Guevara. It’s a place to experiment with the narrative, material, and sculptural nature of ‘books’. Exploring concepts like home, space, memory, and nostalgia from a feminine migrant perspective. Virginia Ramírez Guevara was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

tinaja in Spanish refers to clay jars made for keeping water, oils, or other liquids. The term can also refer to the unit of its contents. Their content is often thought to be sacred and used in offerings.

In English, the term is used for natural made surface pockets formed in bedrock due to water flows that end up carving the rock.

Both human-made and nature-made tinajas are sculptural vessels that tell stories and carry meaning.

Virginia Ramirez, The nestmaker / The home-wrecker, tinaja, 2024, © Virginia Ramirez

What seems like an eternal goodbye drove me to write these texts. Filling the lack, distance, and time between my grandmothers and me. In their last years, we are, alas, apart.

During this time, I started photographing decaying flowers in my home almost instinctively. They were silent witnesses of time. As they dried, they curled up by absorbing the air around them, and with them, my thoughts, pain, and hopes.

These two projects take shape in this edition as an archive and object. The photos are printed on cards, archived, and can be held as collection items, with dates manually stamped on the back.

15 x 20 cm. Berlin. 2024.

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Virginia Ramirez, Angyvir Padilla, An imaginary of displacement, 2017, © Virginia Ramirez, Angyvir Padilla

This is a newspaper edition result of a dialogue with artist Angyvir Padilla for the installation 'An Imaginary of Displacement'. It features photographs taken by both of us, analog and digital. In the exhibition, they were printed and stacked for the duration of the installation, and were free to be taken home by the spectators.

Made for the exhibition ‘Moviendo la fé’ at Neurotitan Gallery.

38 x 52 cm. Berlin. 2017.

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You and me through the broken wristwatch 1

This is an ongoing artwork about the relationship between people and the intimate objects they possess, their personal souvenirs. I interviewed several people about their personal objects during visits to their houses and recorded these interviews.

Book 1: Associations

This edition contains the answers to the following questions/instructions:

1. Draw your object with your eyes closed.
2. What color do you associate with the object?
3. What smell do you associate with the object?
4. To record the sound that the object makes.

25,5 x 29 cm. Brussels. 2013.

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