'Drawing the original: Notes on the typeface for Ines Spanier

I am happy to comply with the request to participate in an act of translation that addresses the originality of every creative act as an act of translation. Originality here does not mean

uniqueness – on the contrary: it is precisely the strength of Ines Spanier's drawing practice

to literally throw herself into her work, far beyond such banal questions. This has a certain obsessive quality, but the question is: obsession with what and through what?

Ines Spanier can sit – or stand – for months on end working on a single drawing: many are so large that they have to be mounted on the wall – which supposedly shows nothing more than something found. A pipe through which water is carried in a house, the skin of a woman shown inexcerpts and with every single hair, the surface of a tabletop or even: the characters of Braille, as they appear on a bus, for example. The sign of communication: writing, in a public place: on the bus. And yet both remain enigmatic, and perhaps not only for those unfamiliar with Braille. Spanier openly addresses the pictorial nature of writing here. And in doing so, he gives us a different view of the typeface itself, which here reveals itself as originally deprived of its communicative function.

I myself am not familiar with Braille. I do not know whether metatextual techniques such as

italicising foreign language terms have an equivalent. Nor am I familiar with the grammatical structure of Braille: what rules does this script enforce, far beyond the writer's imagination? Here, too, the reclusive and introspective working method of Ines Spanier may be a sign, a

symptom: of the emptying of all intention and the automatic repetition in the original drawing of the given. It is an almost a-subjective process, the transfer of a text from one form to another, almost like a copyist who does not speak the language he is reproducing. As far as I know, Ines Spanier did not learn Braille first in order to write this book, to draw it. As a copyist par excellence, she shows that this is precisely where the original work lies, something like an original commentary.'

Prof. Felix Ensslin