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In the south-east of Centro Histórico de Mexico City is Mercado de Sonora. This is a sprawling and exhilarating mixture of all the usual things that you could find on a large city market: fresh products, household items, clothes. But for which he is really known is what is sold around the outskirts. Towards the end of the longest artery on the market, this is the place where you will find traders in traditional medicine in Mexico and occult.
It is a place where traditional prehispanic and Meso-American practices overlap Catholicism. Judas figurines, intended to be burned or otherwise disfigured, are sold in large numbers, as are the decorations linked to the celebrations of the Day of the Dead. You can find dried snakes to treat cancer or dried skuffs to “strengthen” blood. Crucifixes made of odor ocote wood hang next to garlic chains to ward off the evil. And Deer's eyes protect against the evil eye. It is a place where people of all ages and classes brush each other with each other, and where there remains a flourishing and illegal trade in wild animals.
His position on the sidelines and a criminal activity shows in fact an almost impossible place to take photos. But it was not an obstacle to the Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein, whose latest work brings back the promises of black magic and responsible for market incense in the closed personal spaces for which it is known.
At the heart of Franco Klein's multidisciplinary practice is an exploration of modern anxiety. His deeply sought -after and deeply staged photographic worlds are rich in psychological theater and an existential terror.
Now based in Mexico City, she worked abroad for years. Traveling alone and living a nomadic lifestyle made it difficult for her to launch models for her immersive cinematographic work. But it also removed potential anxiety. “I am a pleasure in recovery, so it makes things easier,” explains Franco Klein. “I always have this inner fight when I create a character – trying to please the person in front of me – and I eliminate this conversation of work in self -portraits. I did not want to manage the ideas of others on the appearance of work in the universe that I created. ”
While the previous projects had seen Franco Klein photograph themselves in transitional, limited spaces such as trains and motels – alluding to the ideas of metamorphosis, as well as escape and isolation – Sound market takes place in a domestic space, explicitly in Mexico. And it is not herself that she is thrown before the lens, but rather her mother and grandmother.
You can say that it is a form of extended self -portrait. Whoever examines heritage, femininity, nationality and her beliefs and inherited trauma. “The way I work is intrinsically linked to my biggest fears,” explains Franco Klein. “Growing up in Mexico as a young girl in the 1990s, I experienced a scary world. I was born to be hyperawar. As a five -year -old girl, if I saw a man looking at me, I said to myself: “He wants to hurt me”. I had such vulnerability in the world when I just wanted to be contained with my work, I realized how it translates when people put on my interiors, feelings of collapse and confinement.
The interior worlds it creates are indeed frightening and claustrophobic, pregnant of symbolism, a bit like the staging of filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. The psychological drama and the interior conflicts of their characters are manifested by the palettes of chosen colors. Here, dark reds, greens and yellows feel oppressive, even nauseating. The shadows are heavy and the darkness slips from the edges of the frame.
The fragmented scenes presented to us with a hallucinatory and nightmarish sensation. The dislocated parts of the body appear, a wick of hair. Rituals are played. A voodoo doll full of pins is the tourniquet by red cable, an egg is drawn on the black head of a woman as part of a clean upA traditional healing practice to eliminate negative energies. There are animals. A porcelet (probably alive) stands on a red table, fixing the camera, stuck by red walls. A crocodile (probably dead) rubbed against a green velvet sofa. In each context, there seem to be clues, signifiers of something from another world.
“We spend our whole life trying to fill the gap between us and the world,” explains Franco Klein. This connection of connection is at the heart of its artistic practice, and in the intimate world of Sound marketShe seems to go back – along her ancestral line, through her mother and grandmother, and back through the precolonial history of her country. The result is a set of difficult, tense, expressive and poetic images. They refer to the way in which our lives have become increasingly isolated and fragmented, while we always strive by the deeper attachment and meaning. “My main character is always emotion,” she says. “No matter where you come from. You know what it is to be anxious, you know what it does to feel alone. In the human condition, we can feel loneliness, but we don't have to feel alone.”
“Mercado de Sonora” and other works by Tania Franco Klein can be seen on the stand of Rosegallery on photo London
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