SAID DOKINS lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico
Dokins started doing graffiti and street interventions in the 90s. This experience led him to the School of Arts, where he was interested in conceptual art and the relation between art and writing. He did some studies of Philosophy and Art Theory. He has also done courses in traditional Western and Japanese calligraphy.
He is best known around the world for his monumental writing murals in the public space using a personal and unique calligraphic style, which combines elements from Western and Asian calligraphic traditions, with pre-phonetic writing references, Mesoamerican Pre-Hispanic symbolic inheritance, and Graffiti, combining precision and discipline with expressiveness and spontaneity.
He explores formally, symbolically, and philosophically the potentiality of words and letters. In his work, they become gestures, traces that overlap creating patterns, textures, narratives; marks that carve sites, drawing boundaries, producing meaning. In that sense, for Dokins calligraphy and graffiti are a way to understand our relations with language, an action that stresses time, space, and memory, a political enunciation.
He believes every experience in life can constitute crucial material. His bio finishes with the proclamation that “Every experience is a trace, a psychic impression that creates a texture in our symbolic universe.” The idea extends to his experience building his craft of transforming calligraphy into large-scale public works. “In that sense,” the bio finishes, “Calligraphy and graffiti aren’t just on paper and ink, on the walls and spray, but on every event of our existence.” Turning our gaze from the past to the future, Said Dokins, now officially designated one of the most prominent Mexican creatives in the world, has many years ripe with experience to harvest throughout the rest of his promising career. Discover more at www.saidokins.com.
Sources:
- https://youtu.be/vBU_xJo6ykQ
- https://saidokins.com/
- https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/heliographies-of-memory-giant-calligraphic-text-written-with-light/
- https://www.muralsinthemarket.com/said-dokins
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