‘We write’, she once confessed, ‘on yawning gaps in the walls that once had windows. And people who still have windows sometimes cannot understand.’

And somewhere behind our agreement was the tacit recognition that any original political initiative has to start off as being clandestine, not through a love of secrecy, but because of the innate paranoia of the politically powerful.

The effort of my corrections and the endurance of the paper have begun to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body. The surface of the drawing – its skin, not its image – make me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

How can destinies be named? They often have the regularity of geometric figures, but there are no nouns for them.

I began to make drawings prompted by something asking to be drawn.

There are two categories of storytelling. Those that treat of the invisible and the hidden, and those that expose and offer the revealed.

It may be gathered from this, then, that we endeavour, will, seek, or desire nothing because we deem it good; but on the contrary, we deem a thing good because we endeavour, will, seek, or desire it.

At a certain moment – if you’re lucky – the accumulation becomes an image – that’s to say it stops being a heap of signs and becomes a presence.

At a certain moment, if you don’t decide to abandon a drawing in order to begin another, the looking involved in what you are measuring and summoning up changes.