About

For Said Dokins writing is a form of interpretation of existence where diverse cultural discourses converge; it is a political act that stresses the power relations that shape urban space, history, and the way we understand art. His work articulates the calligraphic discipline with the disruptive gesture of graffiti, tradition, and new technologies. With proficiency, he passes from the philosophical text to the performative action, from the phrase to the event; in the specific place and temporality, he investigates the movement of the bodies and the traces they leave in their transit.

These searches are evident in his large murals, his installations, and site-specific projects, which often include quotes and ideas from thinkers, texts that detonate the flow of collective memory, along with the dialogic processes that he establishes with the communities he interacts with: the exercise of exchange and mutual recognition become rituals that arise in doing together and in the evocation of shared wounds.

His experience in the streets as a young graffiti writer since the 90s, his training in Visual Arts at the National School of Arts and Design (ENAP), as well as in Philosophy and Critical Theory, also at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), his studies in Western calligraphy with renowned teachers, such as Denis Brown and Carl Rohrs, as well as Japanese calligraphy with Master Masahiko Hiyama, added to his deep conceptual interest in the relationships between memory, signs and their modes of representation, led him to develop a unique and personal calligraphy style that combines these calligraphic traditions with references to pre-phonetic writing, the Mesoamerican pre-Hispanic symbolic heritage, and graffiti.

From this mixture of elements, he created his “Primitive Alphabet”, whose letters come to life on conventional supports such as paper or canvas, as well as installations, light painting, or his enormous mural interventions in public space, for which he has obtained notable international attention. In any of the cases, Dokins work is closely linked to the spaces he inhabits but, above all, to the social problems that cross through them, through research and listening to community narratives. On the other hand, among his formal experiments, light has been a central element, whether through video, installation, Virtual Reality, or photography, as is the case of the extraordinary Heliographies of Memory series (2015-2019).