Surrounded in Tears
"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts." Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860
The English Language has developed an extensive vocabulary to classify and understand the act of crying: weeping (associated with deep emotion) is very different to blubbering (colloquial, derogatory) or bawling (associated with children). Bypassing this mass of carefully nuanced and culturally specific linguistic signifiers, Colombian-Caribbean artist Oswaldo Maciá has turned to the semiotics of the raw material of crying itself.
In collaboration with composer Michael Nyman and designer Jasper Morrison, Maciá has created a sound installation compiled of one hundred individual cries.
Maciá's sources come from ethnographic and anthropological studies to informal sound-bites from everyday life - he asked midwives to record the screams of newborn babies. The work also includes Australian Aborigine death wails from the Torres Straight collected in 1898, the oldest known wax cylinder recordings of crying stored in the British Library.
The work does not aim to rationalise crying but draws together personal and universal experience.
In my work I seek to question common ideas about knowledge and perception. How the external stimuli we receive from the world is then translated into images and information through our senses.
Most of my pieces challenge what we tend to consider common knowledge, which becomes the accepted assumption of our reality. It is by articulating this central preoccupation that I confront audience through particular selections of sounds, smells or visions.
Born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia and currently living in London, UK.