"Refranes" is a project that Tania Candiani carried out over four years in Mexico City, Los Angeles, Cairo, as well as in Poland. It was an activation of public space that involved the participation of the inhabitants of each city through the compilation of one of the most creative and complex forms of language with respect to the use and meaning given to words in each culture: refranes (sayings).
With the aim of making "an inquiry into cultural identity through the inventive capacity of a community of speakers--inhabitants of the metropolis, who incessantly reformulate linguistic forms of popular use," the artist set up a mobile mailbox in each city for people to deposit the sayings they considered most popular in their context. She later converted them into silkscreen prints and made posters that were pasted on walls, buildings or commercial shop windows located in key areas or areas with the highest traffic in the places where the project was carried out.
In the case of Mexico City, around the Historic Center one could read phrases that have ed from generation to generation as part of an oral tradition, such as "Dead dogs don't bite," "You look prettier when you keep your mouth shut," "Loose lips sink ships," or "None so deaf as he who refuses to hear," among others. As we read them, each one reveals the cultural worldview or ideologies that hide behind the double meanings that people may attribute to language, conceptions about time, social relations, machismo or life itself.
In addition to being an investigation of language that shows that it is appropriated and constructed among people, at "street level" rather than in the academy, by activating it in the public space, "Sayings" sought to construct a visual and contextual poetics with which readers/viewers could empathize.
While the project has a record of the posters pasted on the walls of each city, the work that is part of the Amparo Museum consists of a selection of 24 silkscreen prints with their respective frames, which were used in the realization of the posters in Mexico City.
AC, January 2022.
Bibliography
Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S. / Mexico Border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014
Israel Rodríguez, “Palabra, silencio, imagen” (Word, silence, image), Gaceta Luna Córnea 3. Mexico City: Image Center, September-December., 2015, pp. 20-24
https://literalmagazine.com/la-mirada-itinerante-tania-candiani/
"Refranes" is a project that Tania Candiani carried out over four years in Mexico City, Los Angeles, Cairo, as well as in Poland. It was an activation of public space that involved the participation of the inhabitants of each city through the compilation of one of the most creative and complex forms of language with respect to the use and meaning given to words in each culture: refranes (sayings).
With the aim of making "an inquiry into cultural identity through the inventive capacity of a community of speakers--inhabitants of the metropolis, who incessantly reformulate linguistic forms of popular use," the artist set up a mobile mailbox in each city for people to deposit the sayings they considered most popular in their context. She later converted them into silkscreen prints and made posters that were pasted on walls, buildings or commercial shop windows located in key areas or areas with the highest traffic in the places where the project was carried out.
In the case of Mexico City, around the Historic Center one could read phrases that have ed from generation to generation as part of an oral tradition, such as "Dead dogs don't bite," "You look prettier when you keep your mouth shut," "Loose lips sink ships," or "None so deaf as he who refuses to hear," among others. As we read them, each one reveals the cultural worldview or ideologies that hide behind the double meanings that people may attribute to language, conceptions about time, social relations, machismo or life itself.
In addition to being an investigation of language that shows that it is appropriated and constructed among people, at "street level" rather than in the academy, by activating it in the public space, "Sayings" sought to construct a visual and contextual poetics with which readers/viewers could empathize.
While the project has a record of the posters pasted on the walls of each city, the work that is part of the Amparo Museum consists of a selection of 24 silkscreen prints with their respective frames, which were used in the realization of the posters in Mexico City.
AC, January 2022.
