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Aleix Font writes Brossa through the language of the street
An artistic intervention in Girona transforms urban graffiti into a landscape of braille dots to delve into the poetic universe of Joan Brossa and question the codes that give meaning to language.
Aleix Font's creation in Girona is based on an invitation to pay homage to Joan Brossa from contemporary art, but avoids the direct reproduction of the poet's work to explore, instead, the mechanisms of thought and his playful spirit. The proposal promoted by the Girona City Council and Bonart, is built from the observation of the environment and the desire to enter the conceptual universe of a creator for whom language, signs and objects could become poetic matter.
Instead of starting from a specific work by Brossa, Font turned his attention to a wall in Girona where there were already graffiti and tags signed by urban authors. These strokes, born of a visual culture of their own and a particular way of occupying public space, become the starting point of a translation operation. The artist decides to transfer each of the tags to the Braille alphabet, replacing the original signs with combinations of dots that allow them to be read from another representation system.
The result is a Braille landscape that preserves the visual memory of the pre-existing graffiti, but at the same time transforms them and incorporates them into a new structure of meanings. In this set of dots, some elements are reorganized to draw the letters of the surname Brossa. The B appears represented with the conventional alphabet, taking advantage of the dots and modifying their colors, while the R, the O, the S, the S and the A are constructed in Braille from dots that come from the graffiti itself. In this way, the intervention is not limited to adding a name on a wall, but rather makes the reference to the poet emerge from the signs that already inhabited that space.
The proposal thus opens up a reflection on language as a system of shared conventions. What we call Catalan, Spanish or English responds to codes that a community recognizes and uses to communicate; in the same way, pictograms, alphabets and different forms of writing express cultural ways of representing the world. Graffiti and braille also constitute systems of signs, with different logics and functions, which here come into contact and transform each other.
At this crossroads between writing, image and public space, Aleix Font finds a way to approach Brossa without imitating him: playing with codes, shifting their meanings and converting an intervened wall into a field of poetic experimentation.
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