Alicia Candiani, visual artist, educator and art writer, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Graduated from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, where she joined the Printmaking and Art History Departments and taught all major printmaking techniques for 15 years. She lectures widely about new and digital media in printmaking and her articles have been published nationally and internationally. She has exhibited extensively and has been selected for inclusion in many prestigious exhibitions. She has been the recipient of many major international awards (Ural, Russia /2001; Macedonia /2000; Varna, Bulgaria /1999, Sapporo and Kanagawa, Japan /1998; San Juan, Puerto Rico /1995, Ourense, Spain /1993) and has been selected by the National Academy of Fine Arts as one of the ten best printmakers in her country and nominated for the Alberto J. Trabucco Foundation Award in 1998 and 2000.

Extract from Grapheion special issue 2002, collection of papers from the conference of the 3rd International Triennial of Graphic Arts Prague 2001

Cecilia Mandrile, The Perfume of Absence, 3D installations: digital printed/hand-sewn fabrics and found objects, 2000-2002

Technique as an unavoidable dimension of printmaking
I have often wondered why printmaking needs to be shown, justified, or wrapped in the folds of complex explanations. The answer has always been another question: is it because of its modest origins, associated with the techniques of mechanical image reproduction, and its multiple quality, that it is distanced from the "aureate" work of individual property; that it is suspected of not belonging to the same lineage as the other visual arts? The answers to these questions have always been difficult because, to a certain extent, all printmaking techniques (from woodcut to Ink Jet printers) were designed to mass reproduce an image, and they arose for more pragmatic reasons than the intellectual pursuit of an innovative language on the part of artists.¹ However, we ought not to forget that artists have always appropriated reproduction methods and have "reinvented" them, forcing them to speak another language, infinitely more sophisticated, one for which they were not originally created.
Constrained by these technical and utilitarian questions, graphic arts have had to engage in a long battle against critical attitudes that establish a general category for art; a category based on a prejudiced hierarchy of values that assigned painting the most distinguished position.² Within this scale of values, printmaking was confined to a narrow territory, limited within the boundaries of its alleged technical autism. The cartography of this territory was described from the most diverse aesthetic perspectives, which for a very long time dismissed the technical component of the work of art, and refused to consider artistic technique as an essential and fundamental dimension of art.³ Within this context, it is not difficult to explain the devaluation of a field that was in the shadows of technical skill and the reproduction of images. We are now aware that the relationship that printmaking has with technology cannot be ignored, far less undervalued, since it is born from the conception of the image and its final execution.
"Each new technology transforms society to such an extent that it imposes a new culture," said Marshall McLuhan. If humanity now enjoys a technology through which visual information can be transmitted instantly from one end of the planet to another, it is reasonable to ask ourselves how this influences our perspective of the world, and how it affects the way we depict it? Right now, the technological processes available to graphic artists are, in many aspects, radically different and infinitely more sophisticated than those available 250 years or even 50 years ago. Today, more than ever before, the technology we use acts at once as a determining factor, and a filter, of significant elements and experiences.⁴ Undoubtedly, we must rethink the relationship between art and technique and the situation of the printed image within these new contexts, which will lead us first of all to radically revise the concepts of "multiple" and "original".