The Intermedial Matrix of a Mexican Contemporary Artist: Tania Candiani

Tania Candiani is a Mexican artist born in 1974. Her works explore written, sound, visual, and body language in various ways. Through her research and artistic projects, she brings together traditional and contemporary artistic disciplines, techniques, and practices, from ancestral rituals to digital technologies invented for the purposes of her own exploration. Candiani combines materials that have relevant ancestral cultural histories, often forgotten or invisible, such as cochineal grain, bodies of water, wind, landscape sounds, singing, textiles, landscapes, architecture, words, and music. These elements are presented in different supports and made with diverse forms of media in which video, photography, embroidery, performance, writing, sculpture, words, and installations, and the invention of devices, objects, and artifacts, interact in an intermedial way. The artist updates and intervenes, often down to the root of the symbolic order, in the functions of the objects, concepts, and phenomena involved in her artworks. We could say that in Candiani’s projects the mixture of all these aspects leads to the development of an archeology of various cultural objects and phenomena that acquire a resignification through which their symbolic root is altered, challenging and expanding our cognitive horizons. In this sense, the idea of artistic intervention that she proposes, deeply rooted in the body and its rhetoric, results in an intersection of historical, material, social, political, cultural, and aesthetic spheres. Candiani’s artistic research methodology usually involves collective work and work with communities from multiple regions and contexts, as well as collaboration with different disciplines, artists, artisans, musicians, dancers, choreographers, engineers, feminist collectives, work groups, etc., to which Candiani presents the problem in question, seeking to generate its processes, and therefore its results, collectively. Sometimes these are reflections that are carried out through performances, interventions, or actions within public spaces, landscapes, and the museum. In this way, she proposes a type of multi- and inter-medial thinking in which a particular phenomenon is explored from a wide spectrum of perspectives, objects, and materials. Something interesting about Candiani’s way of working is her production of series gathered around a theme that originates the title. Both the works and the series, as they travel through museums, galleries, festivals, and diverse exhibition contexts, have the potential to be resignified by other cultural horizons and thus propose new discourses according to the viewer’s horizon. Likewise, with the constellation of themes that have become constant in her career, some works have been integrated with others, assuming a new place among her reflections and highlighting how these works are not completely closed but are part of a comprehensive set of investigations that continue to be updated according to new findings. Below, we describe some of her works in order to show both their intermedial nature and their relationship with the body and with the notion of incorporating. In the same vein as the previous series, Pista de baile [Dance Floor] (2024) explores the possible graphic systems that can translate dance. Here we move to the next level by integrating a musical piece by electronic composer and DJ Pepe Mogt with the participation of ballroom dancers (traditional from Mexico). The work presents different musical genres and types of dance which can be followed by the spectators through a montage of “instructions” that appear above the dancing bodies. These instructions act as both guides and choreographic notation. The work consists of a video installation mounted in front of a real dance floor (which was activated with real dancers on the opening day) in which we find niches for each couple, which at the same time are woodcuts that represent the dance steps to follow. For the …