The tattoo drawings would later be reproduced in ruled cards with a high catalographic, positivist and anthropological aspect.
Thus, the draftsman José Barberá Farrás would then make copies of the drawings – more hieratic than Sabater’s – on cards from the Graphic Catalog of the Museo Etnológico y Colonial, measuring 18 x 24 cm and with the following fields, filled in typewritten text on the front:
Town, locality, subject; age, group, culture, series, complementary data; origin, photo-drawing, acquired-deposited, date in addition to the various annotations that appeared in Sabater’s original drawings of diverse nature.
These notes were transcribed on index cards, giving a formal and hard tone to the annotations; more bureaucratic.
Actually, they should not be treated as copies of Sabater’s sheets but as translations and iconographic, documentary and catalogographic descriptions with their own, slightly varied, style – as happens in any translation or description.
The design is language, the support is language. Content and container are translated in the cards in a way that reflects a more distant and harder position than that of Sabater, who had established a kind of affection with his “models” by living in Guinea: living with the people and speaking their language.
If we take Barberá’s cards as an ethnographic text they certainly give many clues to the relationship of the artist with the Fang. These cards are archival tools that represent the original drawings and that, like any description, reveal the relationship between those represented and the person who articulates such representation, which in turn gives an account of a overall mindset of the country or the metropolis.
They silently represent a way of seeing the Fang world through archival tools.
Jorge Blasco Gallardo. El silencio de las fichas.