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By Jennifer McKay
Step inside a centuries-old church where the walls glow, breathe, and transform before your eyes. In Inscriptions, Mexican artist Said Dokins turns sacred architecture into a living laboratory, blending invisible ink, bioluminescent pigments, and colonies of bacteria to question how memory, power, and presence are written into the urban landscape. Each piece—whether a luminous photograph traced in darkness or a petri dish of living microorganisms—invites viewers to witness writing as a biological and political act. In this fusion of art, science, and resistance, the city’s erased histories pulse back to life beneath the light.
Mexico’s Ministry of Culture and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, through the Art Alameda Laboratory, in collaboration with the School of Architecture, Art and Design under the arts and cultures initiative of Monterrey Institute of Technology, present ‘Inscriptions’, a groundbreaking collaborative exhibition by artist Said Dokins.
The Politics of Presence
What does it mean to leave a mark in a city that constantly erases its own history? How do you negotiate presence in spaces where political, economic and symbolic power determines which voices are heard and which are silenced?
In today’s urban fabric, where gentrification, property speculation and official narratives constantly reshape the territories of the visible, the act of inscription becomes a form of resistance that transcends simple writing.
The exhibition, developed in collaboration with the Act Lab and the Arts and Design initiative of Monterrey Institute of Technology, brings together three experimental projects that explore writing as a critical tool for intervening in urban space and challenging contemporary systems of representation.
Through interventions on the venue’s walls using photoluminescent pigments, nocturnal luminous photographs and biotechnological processes with microorganisms, Dokins proposes a reflection on the tensions between presence and erasure in Mexico City’s urban fabric.
Every act of writing is, fundamentally, a technology of inscription and territorialisation. From the earliest cave paintings to contemporary urban traces, inscription functions as a device that asserts presence, delimits spaces and configures regimes of visibility.
In today’s urban fabric, where representational politics are constantly contested, how does writing operate as a critical tool? How do graphic gestures reconfigure hegemonic systems of spatial meaning?
These questions form the conceptual foundation of Inscriptions, Dokins’s new exhibition at the Art Alameda Laboratory. The show is conceived as an experimental system that explores the tensions between sign and surface, presence and erasure, across multiple scales and languages.
Space as Inscription Field
For Said Dokins inscription transcends its merely textual dimension to become a physical act that reconfigures the environment. His practice articulates an expanded understanding of writing where the body functions as an instrument of inscription and public space as a living archive in constant dispute.
The exhibition is structured around three projects that operate from different but converging scales.
Desplazamientos
Desplazamientos (Displacements) intervenes on the walls of the former temple’s central nave with photoluminescent pigments, condensing urban wanderings into visual forms that escape legibility.
The recognisable forms in the intervention reference the chalcxihuitl – those circular forms that flank the main nave and introduce an ancestral dimension, referring to pre-Hispanic traditions, the turquoise or jade stone affix, and solar radiance in a radial calligraphy.
This destabilises both the colonial narrative of the building’s architecture and its religious past, now functioning as an exhibition space, working as a form of counter-writing.
The work also includes a reproduction of the 1753 “Map of the Most Noble, Loyal and Imperial City of Mexico” by José Antonio de Villaseñor y Sánchez, establishing a temporal dialogue between historical and contemporary cartographies.
Heliografías de la memoria
Heliografías de la memoria, (Heliographies of memory), created in collaboration with photographer Leonardo Luna, documents nocturnal performative actions in front of historically significant monuments.
Through long photographic exposures, the artist inscribes luminous letters that momentarily reconfigure the symbolic value of these intervened spaces.
These images function as critical gestures that interrupt the hegemonic visual order.
Bio_res_crituras
Bio_res_crituras (Bio_re_writings) takes inscription into the microscopic realm, incorporating biological agents collected from epithelial, intestinal and environmental microbiota in the city.
The inscriptions are activated through biotechnological processes developed in collaboration with the Bioengineering laboratory at Monterrey Institute of Technology alongside scientists Carmen González, Aurea Ramírez and Paola Angulo.
The results, presented in Petri dishes and projections, constitute living writings that transform according to the life cycles of the organisms that activate them. This dimension shows how Dokins’s practice transcends conventional notions of street art to enter experimental territories where art, science and technology converge.
De tripas corazón
The interdisciplinary collaboration at Monterrey Institute of Technology extends to the interactive video installation De tripas corazón (From Guts to Heart), created with Piedad MG, Enrique Alcalá and Aurea Ramírez, professors and researchers at the institution.
This piece reflects on the gut-brain axis through generative art, creating audiovisual portraits from the sonification and visualisation of biological data from three people, their intestinal microbiota and brain waves recorded through electroencephalograms.
They can be modified in real time through portable neuroreading interfaces.
Public Activations
The exhibition is conceived as a processual system activated through different strategies. During the opening, Roberto Palma (@Photonic) intervened on the photoluminescent surfaces with laser inscriptions, accentuating the luminous and experimental character of the works.
These activities expand reflections on the links between writing, territory and representation, reaffirming the experimental vocation of the Art Alameda Laboratory as a meeting space between contemporary artistic practices and interdisciplinary critical research.
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