Mexico 2017

Carlos Amorales represents Mexico at the 57th Venice Biennale.

His project “Life in the Folds” was put together with curator Pablo Leon de la Barra and it’s  the outcome of an extensive research, in which the artist introduces a formal language that unfolds in a variety of media within the installation. The exhibition opens with a painting of the series The geometric splendor, a project completed in 2015, and which gave birth to the abstract forms seen in “Life in the Folds”. At the center of the installation is a set of poems written with an encrypted alphabet. The texts, displayed on tables that refer us to paper sheets, imply a transition from the typographic to the phonetic, since each letter, which is a three-dimensional object, is also a ceramic wind instrument: an ocarina that when played, releases a particular sound for each letter. A graphic score composed of 74 photocopies, made from these characters, is interpreted by a music ensemble with the ocarinas. Part of the installation is the film “The cursed village” that articulates the diverse levels of language, and which narrates the story of a migrant family that is lynched as they arrive to a foreign town.