The locks are hidden and they keep themselves | Impronta + Relámpago

The locks are hidden and they keep themselves*

Biombo Program
A project by Impronta + Relámpago
Inauguration: Thursday, July 18th | 7:00 p.m.
From July 19th to December 8th, 2024
Reading room

Language, whether spoken or written, is both key and lock. It is a system of signs that allows us to open doors and cross thresholds, but also to close them and impede passage. They are the words with which we define and name the world, but they are also the limit of what we can say. In the spirit of this metaphor, we have worked with the modular fixed-width typeface Cerrajero (‘Locksmith’), designed and produced in movable wooden type by Relámpago, an experimental printing and publishing operation in Bogotá, Colombia. 

Using the typeface, we printed some phrases commissioned from Daniel Saldaña París to produce, in the Impronta workshop, a series of posters that make up the core of the pieces of this project. On the posters, these verses, in the form of couplets, generate new combinatorial possibilities, different readings that are endlessly replicated by the mirrors in the room. Outside the museum, the posters cover a wall to offer the passerby a moment of surprise: what are these uncertain words saying? What do they contain? Where are they taking me? Each couplet functions as a lock and a key. Sometimes it is possible to open the door and cross the threshold, sometimes the key doesn’t fit. That is exactly how words, writing, and language function.

Relámpago
Impronta Casa Editora

A line taken from the book El lenguaje es un revólver para dos (‘Language is a Revolver for Two’), published in 2008, by Peruvian poet Mario Montalbetti.