Summer News / Noticias de Verano is a bilingual book by Tania Pérez Córdova with three carefully edited texts that create a unique, mesmerizing narrative with the power to transcend any chronological linearity and specificity. Pérez Córdova stages a collective reading from this book as part of the closing celebrations for Viaje a la luna.
Summer News / Noticias de Verano is a project that began in 2019 during Tania Pérez Córdova’s residency on the island of Favignana in Sicily, Italy. It emerged as a response to the generalised feeling of paralysis in the face of world events, and a more personal meditative focus on the passage of time. During the month Pérez Córdova was on the island, she compiled and transcribed all the news she found in local and international media, stripping them of all specificity. In this way, the events were transformed into a collection of micro-stories—tragic, terrifying, and comical—that framed the passage of time normally destined for artistic production. The text also functioned as a reflection on the capacity for intervention in the face of the horror and injustices we witness as readers, which contrast with everyday life. Similarly, Federico García Lorca (the focus of the exhibition on view) understood the power of language.
In 2022/2023, as part of the artist’s solo exhibition Generalización at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Pérez Córdova decided to once again collect the news stories framed by the exhibition’s duration, as a way of acknowledging the world’s events unfolding outside the protected walls of a contemporary art exhibition. And once again, for the second iteration of Generalización at the Sculpture Center in New York City, the artist began a new period of collection and transcription that culminated in a new section of the text.
Summer News / Noticias de Verano is co-published by Juan de la Cosa (John of the Thing) and the Wattis Institute.