In June 24, my experimentations in language and sound visualisation were shown alongside the works of Catalina Renjifo. Below is documentation of the joint exhibition, together with the exhibition text which was kindly written by Finn Fordham, professor of English at Royal Holloway University. For more information on Renjifo’s art practice please see her website here.




For good or ill, Art’s role, since Arthur Rimbaud, has been to bring about a “dérèglement de tous les sens”, a disruption or a deregulation of all our senses, usually understood to be those five enablers of sensation and experience.  But the injunction is to assess tous les sens, not just those five, but the totality of sense.   So ‘sens’ carries the sense of ‘meaning’, projecting a more abstract quality around that deceptively innocent little sound.  Rimbaud would have a deregulation of all meanings and all meaning, an unruliness towards the rules of communication.  


Such a disruption is what Catalina Renjifo and Peter Vance perform in these subtle, enigmatic, and comical works.  

They do so by digging, from opposite ends, into a paradoxical matter: how might we communicate miscommunication?  How can we reconnect with alienation?  The results may seem to be little riddles or unanswerable questions, koans.  We might still want to gather sense in their direction.  But, using monochromatic forms that parody the monochromatic world of our textual world of words, they parody the ways we look to do this. 




Vance begins with the sound of a word, then re-encodes it to produce a form that, lacking any decodable system, is unreadable.  

Renjifo begins with a form, then adapts it into a series to produce the appearance of a code that, lacking any coded system at its root, is also unreadable. 

Vance’s words are obsolete, here dug up, recovered, and revoiced, encouraged again to have an effect on the world.  The resulting forms resemble random scrawls, spirographs gone wrong (as they tended to once you’d brought the toy back from the shop), stains left strategically on plain little stools.  But they are in fact precise representations of a sound as it impinges on a laserbeam, whose distortions then compose a form.   

Renjifo’s forms resemble an obsolete script, dug up by an archaeologist, the traces of a lost civilization, but are a pseudo-alphabet whose shapes stem from the four square construction of a window frame.  This is the archetype of the structure that mediates, separates and organizes; the eye of architects, that gives us the illusion of being a portal through which reality comes pouring.  The ‘words’ resemble graffitied propaganda for either side of a civil war in a foreign land, stern instructions or subversive protest.  But they are neither, having no discoverable origin or ‘sense’, no skin in the game. 




Vance and Renjifo meet at a point where conventional readability - not so much all our senses, but all ‘sense’ - is disrupted.  And yet the process of their production is where a sense of meaning returns to their work.  The process, once outlined, re-encodes the enigmatic product.  They share the meaningfulness of process alongside the product’s meaninglessness.   The result is a reinvigoration of the sense of wonder that we experience when we sense the world not as encoded script but as a script that we ourselves may encode, so that we form thoughts, and thought forms things. 

Finn Fordham, 2024