There is an intimate relationship between drawing and travel. One is often the epistemological metaphor of the other. Not only because drawing and travel share a common vocabulary based on the experience of the body as it moves through space in search of something, or to escape from something. By grounding the understanding of one practice in terms of the other, drawing and travel become a reciprocal experiential basis from which every new drawing and every new travel may be conceived.

This relationship occurs at different instances in Silvia Simões’ drawings. Not the trips planned in detail, but those travels that require time and are, from the outset, subject to wandering, the desire to get lost and the unpredictability of the arrival. Travelling through desert, through mountains and inhospitable or isolated places such as islands – because they are subject to the slowness of time and insurmountable space – seem to render the practice of drawing even more necessary.

Extracted from
Along and Across: Re-enacting travel in Sílvia Simões’ drawings
Paulo Luís Almeida