Tania Candiani

Refranes (Sayings) is a project that is activated from the public space and works in three phases: collecting sayings with a mobile mailbox, printing and pasting posters in the streets with a selection of sayings and a final installation where all the processes are exhibited.

A saying is a popular saying or proverb that people use in their common language. This project deals with an investigation on the use of language, the logic of discourse, the evolution of languages ​​through time, syntax and translation. Looking for a link with the community, Sayings proposes a public exploration of reality conceived as a poetic gesture.

This project has been carried out in Mexico City, San Francisco, California and Cairo, Egypt and Poland.

In Cairo, the first approach was based on literal translation as a complex communication mechanism that inevitably leads to misunderstandings. The semantic decontextualization of the translated texts caused confusion and humor, because the specificity of the sayings for the medium in which they originate makes them explicable but untranslatable. This confusion raises the difficulties of intercultural communication in a clear and playful way. The second approach is, in some way, a comparative experiment, in which a dynamic process, designed and implemented in a specific context (the historic center of Mexico City), is moved to a culturally and historically distant city like Cairo. . A group of local volunteers toured the available sites and invited people to write sayings in Arabic. This project involves research on the use of language, translation, poetic syntax, speech logic, the evolution of languages ​​over time, while proposing a public exploration of reality conceived as a poetic gesture.