Life in the Folds makes use of an encrypted alphabet as a typographical and visual resource in approaching the project created by Carlos Amorales for the Mexican pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. Designed by Ivan Martinez and edited by Isaac Olvera, the book explores the artist's work from the vantage point of various issues involving the encryption of language. Subjects such as the new fascism of individuality, gestural phonetics, and different ways of disseminating words are contrasted with images of the encrypted alphabet transformed into ocarinas, with the screenplay and storyboard of the film La aldea maldita (2017), with the visual score of a performance, and with a list of lynchings (either attempted or actually perpetrated) in Mexico from 2001 to 2017. The texts in the book are by Pablo Leon de la Barra, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Humberto Beck, Monica de la Torre, Carlos Amorales, Josh Kun, and Lizbeth Hernandez. The encrypted alphabet was conceived by the artist on the basis of a series of talks in his studio on the relation between political and esthetic issues.
