This artwork is part of the series “Objections to the object’s supremacy, a.k.a. Marcel je t’aime”.
Common codes or systems allow us to communicate and understand each other. With a strong lingúistic character, this diptych reveals the inability to understand when one does not know the code that is being used to express an idea. Being made in Braille, not all people can understand the work in its entirety, since there is a certain part of meaning that cannot be accessed.
However, sighted people who cannot understand the meaning of what is written in a code that is alien to them, can be stimulated by the great retinal impact of the work in its visual sense. In this way, it could be said that a certain exchange of roles is established between those who have the ability to see and those who have the ability to understand.
In the line of Charles Sanders Peirce ́s abductive reasoning, which seeks the simplest and most likely explanation for a given set of observations, the sighted observers are confronted with an unfamiliar sensory input — the Braille text. They are forced to 'infer to the best explanation’, they must construct meaning not from the conventional sensory input (visual recognition of alphanumeric characters) and form an emotional and conceptual understanding of the work by piecing together the visual aesthetics and the tactile experience.
Sighted viewers receive the visual stimulus, but cannot access the conceptual meaning of the explanation. Thus, they can sense the emotional character of the dialogue between the two parts of this diptych, contrasting on the one hand the use of black and the tight, breathless, hurried writing, and on the other, the white, diaphanous panel, with spaced and rhythmic writing. Blind viewers do not access this visual aspect, but they do access the meaning of the speech.
In another level of significance, the work strongly invites to touch it. Regardless of the visual faculties of the public, all the spectators are summoned to have a tactile experience with the work. That is how it becomes a witness of those who are in its presence, capturing the passage of people, accumulating the trace of the touch of their hands. The role of the work is active, as it is directly modified by the public as time passes, transforming itself and reflecting the trace of those who visit it.
For the realization of this piece, a study was carried out of the place that blindness has occupied in literature. This theme was taken mainly from two different perspectives, approaching two authors with their own views on blindness. On the one hand, the first work - black, dark and confusing - takes the impossibility of seeing from Saramago ́s fictional vision in “Ensayo sobre la ceguera” (1995). This piece exudes tension, created by the color and tight characters, which give a feeling of suffocation and restlessness. The selected quotes from Saramago's work produce an unsettling feeling that resonates closely today, since, until the end is read, one might safely think that said text is an excerpt from pandemic news. On the other hand, the second piece - white, clear and hopeful - embodies Jorge Luis Borges ́ stance, a writer who went blind at the age of fifty-five. As its starting point, it takes a real event, which is not considered as a sentence, but rather as a possibility of seeing the world in a different way. His poems have an idyllic and romantic atmosphere, with spaces between the elements, which give them a light and ethereal character.
