The video emerged from Tales and Other Nightmares, a series of works on paper that feature the first lines of novels by writers including Ray Bradbury, Marguerite Duras, Ralph Ellison, and Milan Kundera. A novel’s opening lines serve to pull the reader into another world, but Candiani’s machine-embroidered lines, positioned above 1950s drawings from Popular Mechanics, evoke not one world but two, each of which rattles the other. Loose threads float among the embroidered words, as if the sentences themselves are fraying.
A key feature of Candiani’s work is the translation of one sensory experience into another, or one materiality or discipline into another, as with the work Bordadora (Embroiderer), a machine that embroiders secrets whispered by visitors in confessional-like booths. The machine both records and obscures the stories whispered to it, encrypting secrets by translating them into graffiti tags.
What does it mean to voice—or to give voice to others, to machines, or to the natural world? This question is at the heart of many of Candiani’s interdisciplinary works, which range from multimedia installations and performances to scores, sound objects, and eccentric machines. In the work Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos muertos (Ancient rivers, piped rivers, dead rivers), the cartographic record of rivers that once coursed through Mexico City is translated onto the cylinder of a music box and so “speak” the traces of the river. For Organ, each key and chord of an organ has been programmed to emit the sound of over one thousand phonic syllables. The organ then voices futuristic texts. In the video Sonorous Object, the fanciful engravings of Robert Fludd’s 1617 Utriusque Cosmi (The Story of the Two Words) are filmed close-up, their incised surfaces documented as one might map terrain. The video’s captions list terms related to geography and sound, such as groove, canal, incision, fissure, and rift, and this quote from Vilém Flusser: “The things of nature that are audible but invisible penetrate us.”
In this interview, Candiani discusses her fascination with the history of technology, the affinities between myth and science, her obsession with the Jacquard loom, and the process of programming an organ to speak phonetical units.
—Eva Heisler
I’d like to begin with your work A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star), in which the first two sentences of Clarice Lispector’s novel of the same name are embroidered on balloons. I’m interested in your relationship to Lispector’s work, but also to this wonderful image of breath bringing to life literary text.
I started out as a writer. I studied literature, then I worked as an editor. Lispector is one of my favorite writers. The first time I made that piece, I used a translation in English. I grew up as an artist in Tijuana, at the border between California and Mexico. I speak a mix of Spanish and English. Many of my pieces are in English or have English titles. For A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star), though, I remade the piece in the original language, Portuguese.
This work is related to your series Tales and Other Nightmares, which appropriates the opening lines of novels. Can you tell me more about this series?
That project was made for a gallery in Miami and, at the time, I was reading a lot of novels in English, so all the first lines are English. I love to open a book and read the first page. Immediately, I start imagining.
I collect the magazine Popular Mechanics. The issues from the 1950s and 1960s include hand-drawn illustrations of all these mechanical things. So, I paired the first lines of novels with drawings from Popular Mechanics. It looks like matching but in another direction. You read the first line of a very famous novel—Peter Pan, for example—but the image might send you in another direction, as if what the drawing illustrates is from another book, offers another possibility. Yes, it is probably a way of rewriting the story.
I machine embroidered the first lines of each novel. Sometimes I omitted a few phrases here and there; I just wanted the necessary amount of words to seduce the viewer. Just enough words to dream with. For example, there is one line from Charles Bukowski’s first novel Post Office which says, “It began as a mistake.” The line is powerful, but also creepy. The drawing is of a man’s feet on the floorboard of a car. You are not sure if the man is about to brake or accelerate.
One of the aspects of your work that I find intriguing is the combination of science and myth or speculative narrative. In Vimana Tale, you build a vimana, a mythological flying structure described in ancient Hindu texts. I’d love to hear about your research and creative process to recreate a flying object from ancient texts.
My vimana doesn’t really fly! For the video, we held the object with a bamboo stick from afar. That’s why the object is always in the corner of the frame, but it’s better not to know that because the video does give you the sensation that it’s flying.
The object was made by Taiwanese artisans who craft flying lanterns. Probably my vimana would fly with some fire, but then it would be consumed. We built that object for recreating the ancient story about flying drones. It is said that kings had the possibility to fly. There are many representations of these flying drones. They’re even carved into rock.
I’ve made several pieces about the vimana. The first one, Vimana, was created for the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale and was based on the Vaimānika Śhāstra, a late nineteenth-century treatise by an Indian engineer who made these amazing drawings articulating the parts of the vimana, trying to convince the scientific community that these mythological devices could really fly and may have been extraterrestrial devices. I worked with the archives—drawings, plans, descriptions of aeronautical technology—and had local artisans construct a device, eight meters in length, that was like a suspended temple made of bamboo, coconut fibers, and paper.
The Vimana Tale is my second work, made for the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. I wrote a tale using this vimana; it’s a metaphysical approach to the possibility of levitation.
You materialize something that was imaginary and mythological, but also use a pseudo-scientific text to build your structures—marrying myth and the history of science.
Early technology is related to wonder. When there were no telescopes, the images imagining what was outside our planet were just speculations. Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi (The Story of the Two Words), from 1617, made beautiful engravings about the cosmos, but they were just a product of his imagination. When the first telescope appeared, those first images were very close to the imaginary wonders. I am fascinated by the stories of early technology because they are full of those kinds of wonders. They’re charged with beautiful stories. I love Fludd’s engravings, and for my work The Sonorous Object, I photographed close-ups of the surface of Fludd’s etchings.
Speaking of The Sonorous Object, the text to the video is a list of descriptions related to geography and sound, like “groove,” “canal,” and “rift”; they describe noises, and evoke the sounds of the physical earth. You are a collector of words, and there is an archival aspect to your work. This brings me to your visual-literary essay Campo semántico de olores (Semantic Field of Scents). You catalog terms for smells, and then relate the terms to visual sensations. My understanding is that, of all the senses, the sense of smell is the one with the least number of words (across cultures).
The essay was exactly about that. Smell is a sense that is very pure. It is ephemeral. You can’t hold it. Sometimes there’s a smell and it moves you, enraptures you, or provokes a memory. In my case, because I have a very good sense of smell, I stop suddenly when I experience certain smells. I might be in the street and a smell captures me and puts me in a place from my past, not a specific place but an emotional place. So how can we describe that? There are so few words that accurately describe smell. I worked with Gerardo Zapata, one of my closest friends and a fellow researcher, to track how smells have been described in world literature. Most of the time, the descriptions are metaphors. In Japanese, there’s even a word for the smell of a kimono from a distance!
Related to your practice of cataloging, I wanted to ask you about Huipiles. The huipile is a traditional garment worn by women in Mexico and Central America for many centuries. You broke down the geometry of these textile designs into black and white. The images, painted on canvas, look so much like letterforms. Was that intentional? You were creating something that looked like a language?
Well, it’s interesting you read it like that. I was not thinking about typography. But huipiles are a language. The embroidery communicates family information and social connections. For example, one design might mean “I'm a single lady, my dad lives on that hill, my grandmother was a curandera (a healer),” and so on. The design identifies one’s place in a community.
But when the Spanish invaded Guatemala in the sixteenth century, they outlawed huipiles. It was a way of outlawing personality and identity. To the Spanish, the Guatemalans were nothing more than Indians, and they made them wear empty, erased clothes, all of them.
The meanings behind these textiles have been lost. Now the textiles are more decorative and less semantic, less full of context and meaning. Huipiles refers to that, the history of erasure and community. The size of each of the canvases corresponds to the exact size of the garment. What I did was to cancel the place where the embroidery used to “speak.”
Let’s talk about your work influenced by the Jacquard loom. For those who might need reminding, Jacquard’s invention was a loom that used punched cards to direct the movement of warp and weft threads and so could quickly execute patterns over and over, and its design influenced the first computers. There’s an extraordinary installation shot of your work Máquina telar (Loom Machine) at the 2011 XI Bienal de Cuenca; it shows a loom above which cardboard punched cards are looped like elaborate drapery.
I started working with these punched cards in Cuenca, Ecuador, in a textile factory. I was invited to the XI Biennale of Cuenca in 2011, and I asked to visit this factory because I am completely obsessed with the Jacquard loom. Even though the factory is successful and now uses electronic embroidery machines, it has kept five working Jacquard looms and pays older workers to keep these machines alive. This is amazing as there are not many places that have kept working Jacquard looms.
The punched cards used in the first installation come from the factory’s archives. They gave me a lot of these cards because the designs were no longer being used.
Does your machine actually work?
Yes, and I learned how to make the punched cards. I perforated the chain of cards necessary to embroider the phrase “hecho mano” (handmade) on a tiny label. I needed 460 cards to embroider this tiny label!
Later, in 2012, at the Museo de la Estampa in Mexico City, I added an electronic reader to the loom so that when viewers turned the crank on the loom, the punched card instructions were translated into sound. The loom was singing. It was a sound translation of the instructions for weaving “handmade.”
So, the machine speaks?
I was interested in the light that gets projected through the punched holes: it creates another code. It’s another way of reading the information on the card, using light.
I had some of the old punched cards hanging as curtains in my studio and it was just amazing because, at certain times of the day, the light came in and made this beautiful language on my walls, which is just light passing through the information.
The system is similar to mechanical piano rolls, and also Braille. I have a piece in which I used the mechanism of the music box. Its cylinder of protuberances “translates” the traces of twenty-one dead and piped rivers of Mexico City. The work is called Ríos antiguos, ríos entubados, ríos muertos (Ancient rivers, piped rivers, dead rivers). When you force a river underground through pipes, the image of the river, its face, disappears. The river is no longer a “drawing” on the land. I traced the original line of the river as a line in a cylinder of a music box. When you play the music box, you are hearing the trace of the river.
Your works often present experiences of voice and sound in surprising ways, and you have an interest in the sonic experiences of machines. Your works encourage viewers to listen in unexpected ways. The exhibition Five Variations on Phonic Circumstances and a Pause consisted of five works, each a machine or instrument that translates sound—what you call “phonic circumstances”—into text or code.
That was a large and important exhibition for me. One of the works is an organ that plays phonetical particles. Our first attempt at programming the organ was a failure because we were trying to reproduce the sound of each letter—a, b, c, d, and so on—but the sound of a letter is not a language. Then we understood that we needed to program all the sounds you need to speak a language. Each key and chord was programmed to sound a phonic syllable, for a total of 1201 syllables for English. This allows texts to be translated into musical notation. There’s a long tradition of trying to replicate the human voice with machines, and the organ “speaks” futuristic sci-fi texts.
We have programmed the organ to speak English, Spanish, and Russian. A different program for each language. For Spanish, there are more sounds and we needed to program over 2,000 sounds. The sounds for each language are completely different. It’s so funny how in Spanish the organ sounds like a child because of the nature of the phonetical units. In English, the organ sounds like a sexy voice. In Russian, the organ sounds more like an opera singer.
In writing about Five Variations on Phonic Circumstances and a Pause, you expressed an interest in “the process of translation, and the relationships between scores and words, sounds and stories, punched cards and music, and even between what is said and what is understood and written.” Can you say more about this—especially about your understanding of “translation”?
One of the terms I always use to describe my practice is “translation.” I might translate a physical image into sound, or light passing through perforations into code, or spoken words into embroidered graffiti tags. What is beautiful about translating in this wide and open sense is that the act is one of play and crossing borders, remixing material, language, and sensory experiences.
