18 NOV, 2023 - 20 JAN, 2024

A DUO EXHIBITION BY 

BERNKE KLEIN ZANDVOORT & LUCÍA HINOJOSA GAXIOLA

18 NOV 2023 | 5 PM

OPENING

/  SOUND PERFORMANCE of Letters to Unknown Letters:

Micro-improvisations for headphones by Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola & Enrique Arriaga 

//  COLLECTIVE READING by Bernke Klein Zandvoort, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Jo Ying Peng in collaboration with Kara Rooney and Renata Del Riego

30 NOV 2023 | 8 PM

PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE of Rewritings of Invocation

13 JAN 2024 | 5 PM

GUIDED TOUR with the artists

20 JAN 2024 | 5 PM

CLOSING: POETRY READING

/ Collective reading by Bernke Klein Zandvoort, Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Jo Ying Peng in collaboration with Kara Rooney and Renata Del Riego

//  Letters to Unknown Letters by Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Editing and translation: Diego Gerard Morrison, Lucy Pawlak

Production: Laurie Abad, Enrique Arriaga

Celis, Ollin Miranda, Todo Woooow

Documentation: Aimée Suárez

EYE AS AN ORACLE

BERNKE KLEIN ZANDVOORT

Two-channel video installation with blinds, projectors, tripods, speakers, 2023

Camera: Kyulim Kim, Annelein Pompe, Bernke Klein Zandvoort

Sound recording: Andrès Garcia Vidal, Achiel van den Abeele

Sound design and mix: Andrès Garcia Vidal

Music: Enrique Arriaga Celis (adaptation of O Virtus Sapientie Alio Modo by Hildegard von Bingen)

Edit: Bernke Klein Zandvoort, Bram Ruiter

Color correction: Bram Ruiter

Typography: Nuno Beijinho

Translation: Laura Schuster, Michael Mariaud García

Thanks to: Marion Algra, Mei Lan Ng, Floris de Lange, Donders Institute for Brain,

Cognition and Behaviour, Frédérique Bak Oogprothesen, Rik van Duijn, Lea-Maria

Schmitt, Mandy Bartsch, Rodrigo Red Sandoval. 

THIS PROJECT IS MADE WITH THE SUPPORT OF AFK, MONDRIAAN FONDS, STICHTING STOKROOS. 

THE ROPE FROM SENSE TO SENSE

BERNKE KLEIN ZANDVOORT

Single-channel video installation, 2023

Musicians: Rafael Basquez Aguirre, Juan Jesús Ocampo Flores, Carlos Aguilar Camacho, Luis Alberto Rivas Lara

Camera: Dan Sánchez Díaz Vildósola

Sound recording: Enrique Arriaga Celis

Sound design: Enrique Arriaga Celis

Sound master: Enrique Arriaga Celis, Rodrigo Esquivel 

Sound mix: Rodrigo Esquivel 

Song: Juan Jesús Ocampo Flores, Bernke Klein Zandvoort 

Edit: Andrea Rodea / Rhizomes Films, Bernke Klein Zandvoort

Color correction: Andrea Rodea

Translation: Diego Gerard Morrison

Thanks to: Rodrigo Red Sandoval, Tuna@Radio Nopal

THIS PROJECTIS MADE WITHTHE SUPPORT OF MONDRIAAN FONDS, AND THE DUTCH EMBASSY IN MEXICO.

Letters to Unknown Letters

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Sound sculpture (headphones, leaves, rocks, found objects, lightbox). 20 minutes on loop. 2023. (The sound sculpture will be activated through a performance and a “concert for headphones”.)

Field recordings: Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Sound editing: Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Raúl Zetina, and Santiago Parra

Mixed and mastered: Pedro y el Lobo Sound Studio, Mexico City.

Thanks to: Darinko Chimal and Lucía Meliá Maestro.

*The poem Letters to Unknown Letters was originally published in The Minutes, a publication by the The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.

Rewritings of Invocation

Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Performance, sound works, archival installation, 2023

Facilitators: Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Marisa Naina, Natalia Hernández Morales

Performers for Experimental Choir: Natalia Hernández Morales, María del Pilar Morales Rayón, Eugenia Suárez Rodríguez, Itzel Nallely Castillo Espinosa, Nuns and caregivers from Casa Cuna La Paz: Inocencia, María, Cristabel, Amelia, Delia, Mercedes, Martina, Asunción, Aurea Luz, Carmen, Guadalupe.

Score design: Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola y Tatina Vázquez Estrada

Thanks to: Ruta del Castor, Fernanda Angulo, Sofía Casarín, Andrea de la Torre, Casa Cuna La Paz, Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, Sophie Sieta, Naomi Woo, Emilio Hinojosa Carrión, Alejandro Quiróz, Diego Gerard Morrison, José Antonio Hinojosa, Chloe Zimmerman

Eye as an Oracle | Bernke Klein Zandvoort

In the work Eye as an Oracle, Bernke Klein Zandvoort presents the gaze as a projector. She draws upon the ancient theory stating that we see by means of rays beaming out of our eyes. These eye beams would supposedly extend out to touch things in the external world, like hands do, in order to return to the eye after contact, carrying information. Seeing, then, was imagined as a reciprocal process in which physical contact between viewer and that which is viewed bound them together for a fleeting moment. Klein Zandvoort takes this theory as a point of departure for speculations with regards to relationships between sight, image, and virtuality through various textual and visual narratives. 

A woman experiences phantom images through an eye after its surgical removal. Artificial eyes are produced by hand in the laboratory of an ocular prosthetist. The Predictive Brain Theories research group examines how prediction forms the basis for our perception. A blind artist reproduces her mirror image by touch, while describing the layered visual experience she's had since the onset of her blindness.

Camera, screen, and projector are present as silent protagonists in the installation. As an undercurrent, Klein Zandvoort ponders whether borders between image, imagination, and representation are more porous than we believe them to be. Can we consider vision as a virtual process and perception as a continuous montage?

The Rope from Sense to Sense* | Bernke Klein Zandvoort

This video work was woven from the material of several meetings, interviews and recording sessions with a group of blind musicians that work in Mexico City’s Historic Centre. The interviews revolved around their relationship with the senses, thus vocalising the silent, unperceived experiences of these musicians. From the interviews, the artist selected sentences that she shared with the musicians as lyric material for a song. After receiving their own words back, the musicians composed a sound piece that invites the listener on a fleeting journey into the experience of their internal and external worlds – and into the notion of an acoustic gaze.

*This line is taken from a poem by Kazuko Shiraishi

Letters to Unknown Letters | Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

This work draws upon secret alphabets including Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota (Unknown Language), the oldest invented language created by a woman. Using the soles of her feet to scratch and draw the forms of letters over different surfaces, Hinojosa Gaxiola created an audio alphabet that aims to “write” with friction, to then record the sounds of these gestures.

The artist created a sound sculpture by “writing” the poem Letters to Unknown Letters with her sound alphabet. The poem is a letter to the future of language, speculating on how letters might adapt to a new reality where our contemporary understanding of (human) language no longer exists. In this work, we listen to a tactile, sonic poem/correspondence where language becomes a separate entity, leaving an indecipherable message scattered on the planet. This piece also draws upon other research sources, for example, the Tibetan concept of "terma"– encoded information written in a non-human form and buried in the ground or in a rock, secreted in a herb or a tree, hidden in the sky, in water or in space. Thus, Letters to Unknown Letters functions as an asemic sonic-poem that remains concealed within the planet. This meditation upon the non-existent future of human communication imagines, or else, predicts a world where these resilient letters have survived in order to evolve within the continuous flux of time and its conditions. 

Rewritings of Invocation | Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Rewritings of Invocation is the first performance in a series researching early choral compositions made by Mexican nuns under anonymity in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. These scores have not been heard for centuries, remaining hidden and overlooked in convents and churches (poorly archived, rarely studied, highly disorganised, and trapped beneath layers of bureaucracy). While trying to recuperate these original compositions, Hinojosa Gaxiola encountered two scores at the Ex-Convent of Santa Mónica in Puebla. Specialists informed her that identifying whether a female composer had written these exact scores was almost “an impossible project” of speculation. Thus, anonymity continues to veil the work and the road towards its place in history falls away. At the same time, this anonymity holds the potential for multiple identities to emerge, creating a collective metaphor allowing other voices to re-sing these absences as a form of both, a plead and a protest. How does anonymity sound? Can these absent presences be invoked through a hidden archive? Will these archives ever be reclaimed or made available? 

Rewritings of Invocation reinterprets and rewrites these scores as a form of defence seeking to reclaim the identities of anonymous female voices. Hinojosa Gaxiola collaborated with Natalia Hernández’s women’s collective practising self-defence and martial arts in Santa María la Ribera, as well as with a group of nuns who run the orphanage Casa Cuna La Paz in Mexico City. Through workshops, conversations and encounters, these identities merge to become an action of self-defence scored through voices and body language.  

Throughout the space, the artist presents choral fragments that were recorded during the meetings and workshops, as well as the scores that functioned as the starting point for this experimental choir.