I OWE YOU

what is owed and to whom

Part of the PROJECT: DIBUJA EN EL TIEMPO – Draw in time: Synchronic Impressions from Territorial Strokes & Traces.

23 07 2026

Concept by Karla Peralta Málaga Senior Art Curator

Every July, before a year tips into its second half, something in us pauses to take inventory of effort spent, of resources gathered, of what is owed and to whom. This is not a modern habit, it is an old, recurring human practice, repeated across seasons and geographies long before calendars had names for it. 

This gesture echoes a 17th-century chronicle by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, who drew each month of the year as a human action rather than a number. July is rendered by him as a scene of inspection and exchange, where a central fire acts as the transformative engine that validates the redistribution of energy.

I owe you is the quiet sentence underneath that pause, the debt, promise, and exchange that surface once we stop long enough to count. This month's chapter of Draw in Time asks artists to draw that sentence, to give it a line, a mark, a trace. We're interested in artworks that move through inspection, distribution, or both. Inspection: the act of looking closely at what has accumulated labor, material, memory, time itself, documenting, measuring, or auditing a practice, a body, a landscape, a year lived. Distribution: the act of dividing, sharing, or redirecting what has been gathered, tracing exchange, imbalance or scarcity. 

"Drawing" here is read broadly: a line can be a gesture, a movement with our body, a system, a generated code, a ritual repeated until it leaves evidence behind. We welcome any medium in which practice itself becomes inscription a way of marking time as it passes, not representing it afterward. 

This is a call for artists whose work owes something to time, to material, to a year lived, to someone. This is your I Owe You. This is an invitation to perceive energy exchange. We want to see it, put your name on it.