Syllabaries. Between images and words brings together the proposals of 15 artists who joined the call for the Second Seminar and Publication organized by Hispafest in partnership with MIFA during June and July 2020. During four intense weeks, the participants carried out reading exercises, writing, and visualization that allowed exploring his works’ conceptual and aesthetic possibilities in a reflective atmosphere. The experience led to the set of images and meditations compiled in this publication as a free blog, in which each author contributes their approach and criteria.
Images and words as components of a hybrid language, alien to literal verbalization and saturated with resonances, construct a permeable space – sometimes evocative, sometimes allegorical – but always loaded with meaning. Nature, subjectivity, myths, memory, and the present make up the repertoire of concerns that intersect in this plural attempt to inquire in media as diverse as photography, painting, drawing, installation, and graphics concur digital. It is a brief compendium of searches, located in the double contour that words and images delineate in the vast horizon of the sensible, precisely the area to which the protagonists of this publication enter promisingly.
Nathalia, Leti, Vero, and Jimena develop personal cartography of the landscape (fluvial, marine, etc.) in an atmosphere of chromatic and compositional austerity. Milixa, Claudia, and Teresa delve into the idea of femininity, touching on the archetypal, the psychic, and the cultural. Salvador, Dalia, Rafa, and Marco move between self-referentiality and introspection, using the work as a mirror platform where the “I” reveals its kaleidoscopic profile. Maru and Marie confront values of coexistence and improvement as an alternative to intransigence. Finally, Isaac and Geraldine offer two perspectives in mutation: the idea of change as a form of existence or the displacement between one language and another.
In these pages remains the testimony of a shared process – as complex as it is enlightening – that challenged the harsh restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, showing that art is a powerful antidote when it comes to averting the aftermath of an uncertain time. Indeed, the facts cannot be denied or modified, but the way we perceive and face them can be changed. Silabarios, as an initiative for artistic training and dissemination, offers other perspectives where the sensitive experience radiates kinder and intellectually substantial connotations on the world we inhabit.
Felix Suazo
Featured Artist:
Claudia Ammirata
Dalia Berlin
Geraldine Cortes Londono
Issac Bencid
Jimena Gutiérrez Bisbal
Leti Capriles
Marco Caridad
Marie Franco
Maru Ulivi
Milixa Moron
Nathalia Delgado Nachtigall
Rafa Muci
Salvador Llobet
Tere Jessurum Uribe
Vero Murphy