"Crossing Lines: Global Drawing"

"Drawing is a continuum; a multi-faceted, transdisciplinary global practice. It is something that almost every person encounters and partakes in at some period during their lives; from the early childhood marks of notations, writings and texts, to open-ended contemporary processes. Drawing is akin to a visionary process; it has an origin, a point of inception, and from here ones ideas travel and are, in most cases, open ended – there are no rules; drawing can be as minimal as a breath and as complex as the wave structures and recordings of the ocean. Drawing is a kinesthetic; a movement between points, a connection a recognition and gesture of any idea, mark, trace, line, symbol, shape, medium, space or surface - everyone has their own ‘language of the mark."

Dr.  Irene Barberis[i]
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[i] Barberis, I 2011, Keynote as a Drawing, Drawing as a Keynote, ‘Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East’ Conference, American 

If we were to take a 'global audit' of drawings now from all countries, what would we see?

"Crossing Lines: Global Drawing" launches the new world wide Metasenta® Project for young and emerging artists, including work from two curating artists per venue. The first venue for six of the participating art schools/Universities is the SACI Institute, in Florence, Italy from the 6th November 2015

The Metasenta® Project, A Global Audit : Drawing Everywhere ©, commenced in 2007 in conversations and plans between Professor Stephen Farthing RA, Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Drawing at the University of Arts London, and Dr Irene Barberis of RMIT University, and Founding Director of the Metasenta® International Research Satellite, and the Global Centre for Drawing. An ‘audit’ was made of most Art Schools and Universities in the world, and a list drawn up.  Now seven years later all locations are in the process participate in the Metasenta® Global Drawing Audit, 2015 – 2020 ©’. The first groups are being exhibited at the SACI Institute, Florence Italy from 6.11.2015 till 22.12.2015 ©

‘‘Crossing Lines: Global Drawings’, Exhibition #1
A Global Audit: Drawing Everywhere ©’

 Every day most of us traverse the world via the web. Our lines of demarcation have transformed particularly over the past ten years from domestic inhabitants in real space, to virtual ‘world travellers’; even in the remotest parts of all our countries the mobile phone and internet opens the doors of new realities for us. At some point all our senses have been used for accessing peculiarities of our location, (…light, touch, smell, taste, sound…), but at this time we have an enhanced sensory experience only of the visual and audible, a full experience of virtual reality is still limited. On saying this we are however are able to zoom so far into a site that one can, for instance see the reflection on a dewdrop on a giant lizard’s scale, or zoom out into the cosmos to an array of deep space fields, or even watch the REM movements of the human eye and the burst of neurons in the brain which follows them. We can project our rooms and environment into another’s location, draw in real space or virtual space with the ease and fluidity reserved a couple of years ago to si-fi realities; we cross boundaries. For students and emerging artists informed thinking, process and unlimited possibility of drawing everything everywhere in any context is a reality, only constrained by one’s political and economic conditions.

Inaugural participating art schools: RMIT University (Australia), The American University in Dubai (UAE), UNICAMP, Universidade de Campinas  (Brazil), SACI Institute (Italy)