ISBN: 978-3-9823166-0-4
15 x 21 cm (softcover)
144 pages
Published: March 2022

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ISRAEL MARTINEZ is an artist and author based in Zapopan, Mexico. Seeking to generate a social and political critical reflection, and often exploring stealth as a communicative situation of deep relevance, Israel Martínez works with sound as a starting point to create pieces and projects usually materialized in multichannel audio installations, video, photography, actions or performances, texts, publications, and interventions in public spaces. In 2007 he was granted an Award of Distinction in Prix Ars Electronica, and in 2019 he was a winner of the CTM Radio Lab Call in Berlin. He has had solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MuseumsQuartier, MACBA, Moscow Biennale, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, daadgalerie, Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, MUAC, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Museo Arte Carrillo Gil, MUCA Roma, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, among others. In 2012 he was part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and in 2014 of the residence program of MuseumsQuartier in Vienna.

Dead People Whispering to Us
by Israel Martínez

Moving across a range of sites and situations, Dead People Whispering to Us is a book of stealth, where the author’s listening-writing practice attends to the disappearances and invisibilities shaping much of contemporary life. Author and artist Israel Martínez writes his own book of the dead, chronicling the necropolitical reality in Mexico through a persistent belief in social change realized between friends and strangers. The dead, for Martínez, become guides toward a form of poetic activism.

How do you listen to an internal monologue?
A monologue that is inaudible but makes pictures from words.
And how do you hear its inner listening?
A listening to sounds that remain inaudible to both of us
How can we share that?
To find a joint path into something so personal and site specific as the ear.
Being a tourist, remaining a tourist
“I LIVE HERE NOW!”
In this place where things flow by the rhythm of a present nostalgia.
Real sounds and imagined sounds meeting in the ear drum to make a new language from memory and present time; from what was heard and what might be heard, which is a place where optimism and pessimism meet and undo each other in a music of “ANOTHER PLANET WITH YOU”.
Reading Dead People Whispering to Us is not a passive act. Instead, it is a listening to words forming inaudibly, making a work for me to tend to, close up. To hear your silent ruminations in my head.
- Salomé Voegelin

A collection of reflections, narratives, inner dialogues, seemingly overheard conversations and ghostly memories navigating between listening and writing. As if voicing Mexico from a distance; as if relistening to it from another space-time, or listening to its echoes in a non-chronological time and in multiple spaces. Looking for “the map of a new society” generated by crossing practices, starting from listening and the “transitory”, “migratory” nature of sound.
- Elena Biserna