Luisa Pastor turns the pages of old accounting ledgers into a weaving of cellulose and gold. In that gesture, she displaces the question of value onto the very structure of accounting notation, whose horizontal and vertical lines, the same ones that once ordered sums, debts and balances, come to serve as warp and weft, while the ledger, which for decades recorded movements of money and can for that very reason be read as an archive of traces, in which each figure remains as the mark of an exchange already completed, is now overwritten with the fullest presence of value: gold covering and running through the page. Subjected to this material translation, accounting notation opens itself to a new reading of the economic and symbolic relations that traverse language.

Figures dwell in the warp, those vertical threads on the loom that remain fixed and separate from one another, and that enter relation only when the weft appears; the thread that crosses them and binds them all together. To weave is, in this sense, to bring things into relation, and the accounting ledger, conceived as a tool for calculation, was already a weaving of that kind, since each entry linked the one who owed to the one who was owed and sustained, in that minimal bond, something of the order of a social fabric. That reciprocity, which governs the account as much as the weave, is what Luisa lays bare by turning the ledger into weaving.

The operation has a precise genealogy in the research Luisa has devoted to the poetic deconstruction of language inaccounting books, grounding her studies in the structuralist and poststructuralist theories that address the rupture, fragmentation and disarticulation of language. Saussure compared language to a sheet of paper whose front would be thought and whose back the mental representation of sound, warning that it is not possible to cut one without cutting the other as well. Luisa takes that warning literally, because what she cuts is a sheet whose reason for being was to guarantee that each figure referred to a single meaning, and she displaces it toward something else.

In this covering, cutting and interlacing, a page is recomposed not into another image but into the structure that holds it up from within. Hence, the pieces move away from the notational systems distinguished by Nelson Goodman, in which each mark corresponds unambiguously to a single element, toward dense systems, such as drawing or painting, in which the mark does not admit a single reading. The account book is perhaps the strictest notation that everyday life has produced. By weaving it, Luisa carries this notation into the territory of density, and the number becomes gold deposited on the pages, pure matter. To write with gold is, in this sense, to break economic discourse with the very value it invokes.

The gold that runs through the wefts points, moreover, to a double deposit: the one extracted from the earth and the one that lies beneath the sign, buried in layers of convention. On Earth, gold appears in two ways: in the veins that run through the darkness of rock and in the beds of rivers, which slowly loosen it from the mountain and leave it, grain by grain, in their meanders. Luisa excavates the document and lifts its surface in search of what accounting notation covers even as it names, and the grid, fixed in its tracing like a riverbed, receives what the weft, turned current, deposits along its way.

Luisa Pastor interprets the arithmetic of value. And in that interpretation, what once ordered the world of accounts becomes fissure, murmur, poetry.