“Our Silences” (Nuestros Silencios) @ SF Ferry Building: MEX I AM Festival

Art Exhibition on Free Speech, “Our Silences” (Nuestros Silencios) features 10 anthropomorphic bronze human figures that are eleven-and-a-half feet tall and weigh roughly a ton each with covered mouths.

Featured at the Harry Bridges Plaza, the traffic median on The Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building: http://www.mexiam.net/embarcadero.php .

The exhibition is part of the "MEX I AM, Live it to Believe It” , running through July 26, all over San Francisco. The artist, Jose Rivelino (bio below) was present during the opening.

About Nuestros Silencios Exhibition:

The exhibition Nuestros Silencios, is a contextual itinerant sculpture installation. The piece was created to generate a reflection on the importance of freedom of speech and self-censorship; it strives to facilitate an intimate yet open dialogue, with respect to one of the fundamental human rights, as well as establishing a symbolic exchange with the places where it has been set up.

The ten monumental bronze busts with covered mouths and the so called tactile box for the blind, are a project designed to travel around the world. Beginning in 2009, the installation has been presented in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Italy, The United Kingdom, Russia, Mexico and in the United States, it has been presented in San Diego and now for the first time in San Francisco at the Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building.

The appropriationist style that Rivelino resorts to as he take archetypal forms of ancient sculpture to build this work, seeks to establish an immediate bond with the spectator’s memory and to generate a highly relational work of intense physical contact, in essence a challenge to freedom and its daily exercise.

About Jose Rivelino:

Jose Rivelino (Jalisco México, 1973), represents young mexican sculpture. He has developed an artistic proposal that is distinguished by the exploration of the genres of relief and sculptural intervention in Urban Space. He is interested in highlighting dialogues with collective memory, and has found the urban environment to be an ideal territory in which to interject imaginary pasts and presents. Conceived of as a place that contains multiple memories, the space occupied by streets, plazas, meeting spots or emblematic buildings is interjected with sculptural levels that come forth not only in the city itself, but also, in its identity and history. Through themes laden with social, ethic and human right implications, his interventions in the public space alter the aesthetic order of spectators through sculpted narrations that transition between reality, what is surreal, what is possible, and the impossible.He has recently ventured into the field of public interventions. During this time, in his very peculiar works, Rivelino has accomplished an interaction between quite dissimilar materials such as clay, bronze, steel and silver, which range from the small formats to the monumental ones. The sculptor is chiefly self-taught, despite his education from the School of Ceramics of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA).

"MEX I AM, Live it to Believe It” , running through July 26 all over San Francisco. There’s something for everyone, including musical performances, food tastings, ballet dancers, opera singers, film-makers, sculptors, and panel discussions by Mexican neuroscientists, biotech executives, and cultural critics. 

For further information or to set up interviews, please contact me at 650-270-7810, or Mario Garcia, Media Affairs, Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco at (415) 999-9868 /[email protected]  .