This notebook is a handmade object, built through intuition, accumulation, and direct gesture. I made it with my hands, without a plan and without the need for perfection. Each page comes from touching the materials, from cutting, pasting, layering, and saturating until the image finds its own pulse. There is no distance here between the idea and the gesture: what I think moves straight through my hands.
I work with Venezuelan banknotes and free magazines collected in Zurich. These materials already carry their own histories—value that disappeared, images that promise order, economies that do not resemble each other. In this notebook, they lose their original function. The banknotes become texture, memory, surface. The magazines break apart, their aspirational perfection collapses, and they mix with my symbols, my obsessions, my humor, my memories.
Inside the notebook, scenes coexist that shouldn’t belong together, yet here they find their place. Bolívar appears cut out and displaced, no longer tied to the solemnity of monuments but thrown into everyday chaos. Luisa Cáceres shows up between perfume ads, as if history had slipped into a luxury catalogue. Roosters echo my paintings, open mouths shout or laugh, hands point, eyes watch, plastic chickens, fruits, flames, and national heroes collide with supermarket offers. Everything accumulates until the page breathes.
The notebook doesn’t follow a linear story. I don’t try to explain anything. I let the images meet each other. I work through impulses, associations, frictions. Sometimes a page begins with a color that won’t leave me alone; sometimes with a torn banknote; sometimes with a phrase from a magazine that becomes absurd or revealing once removed from its context. I’m interested in that moment when an image loses its original purpose and becomes something else.
This notebook is also a place where migration becomes material. I don’t narrate it—I make it. It’s in the banknotes that no longer hold value, in the magazines nobody asked for, in the heroes who travel without permission, in the objects that mix without hierarchy. It’s an emotional field notebook, an intimate archive where memory works through layers, saturation, humor. Imperfect, direct, insistent.
Some pages feel like small altars, others like visual jokes, others like scenes from a play that doesn’t exist. Sometimes an unexpected order appears; other times, a chaos I refuse to resolve. I’m interested in that tension: the solemn turning ridiculous, the ridiculous turning sacred.
This notebook exists because it needed to exist. It is where I organize the world in my own way—through accumulation, mixture, insistence. A living object shaped by my hands, my memories, my materials. A place where what I carry with me and what I find along the way merge into a language of their own.
Honys Torres
Zürich, 2026
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