Said Dokins: when calligraphy finds graffiti

Mexican artist Said Dokins has put on curatorial projects related to urban arts and a number of political issues happening in his country

For Said Dokins calligraphy and graffiti are intermediate practices of inscription and trace, of twisting symbolic orders and of political enunciation.

Dokins lives and works in Mexico City. His cultural practice takes on contemporary art production, research and cultural management. He has put on curatorial projects related to urban arts and a number of political issues happening in his country.

Among other awards, is the winner of the Iberoamerican Contemporary Art Creation Prize, Cortes de Cadiz, Juan Luis Vasallo 2015 in Cadiz, Spain. His work as an artist has been shown nationally and internationally in countries as Spain, Germany, Holland, Belgium, United Kingdom, Argentina, Chile, Brasil, El Salvador, Peru and others.

Every experience is a trace, a psychic impression that creates a texture in our symbolic universe…

It takes up the economy of medieval calligraphy, the energy and expressiveness of japanese calligraphy, besides creating a poetic based on pre-phonetic writing.

For Dokins every experience is a trace, a psychic impression that creates a texture in our symbolic universe. In that sense, calligraphy and graffiti aren’t just on paper and ink, on the walls and spray, but on every event of our existence.

This year, IBUg Festival took place in a small textile factory in Limbach,  abandoned just after the  fall of the Berlin Wall. The project The Hidden Text, attempts to elaborate a reflection on history and the marks that certain events leave behind.

In Germany, the former division remains there in a different way, it’s visible through architecture, people’s life style, economy, or even social control and politics.

Projects which favor dialogue with the community…

In Halle, another connotation is added to the project. It is an abandoned neighborhood, that is going through a recovery process. OpenSpaceGallery has created a recovery program through art, creating murals among other strategies of neighborhood improvement, which favor dialogue with the community, and also elaborate participative prognosis, where the inhabitants share their needs and inquiries.

Currently, they’re going through a stage of building community gathering places, including a park, music jams, discussion spaces, and the most important of all, they are creating strategies to avoid this improvements to led to gentrification, by intercede in public policies so the inhabitants can afford to buy their houses and improve them.

At the present moment, Said is in the beautiful city of Bordeaux, France, working on an exhibit and a wall for the Cox Gallery in collaboration with Monkey Bird Collective.