Equivalencias (2026)
Text - Framed
10 pieces
76 × 38,7 cm
10 pieces
76 × 38,7 cm
Equivalencias articulates a chain of translations from voice to document through three regimes: the shorthand (Stenografie) writing, the handwritten draft, and the typed letter. Each layer corresponds to a different degree of stabilization, moving from the immediacy of listening to the formal conventions of institutional language.
At the center of the work is shorthand (Stenografie), a system of fast writing used in administrative contexts to transcribe speech in real time. Many young women who arrived from the countryside became secretaries in the city, where they were trained in this technique. In this setting, the boss dictated business letters aloud, and the secretaries transcribed them into shorthand (Stenografie) in order to keep up with the speed of his speech. The dictated voice sets the pace of the process, while their work consists in converting it instantly into a compressed written system designed for rapid transcription. This system produces a tension between voice and body, that means, the formal authority of language and its physical enactment. Writing becomes less reflective than operational: an exercise in synchronizing hand and ear, where speed and accuracy determine the form of the script. The shorthand (Stenografie) page preserves this condition, often approaching the edge of legibility as it compresses speech into notation.
This dynamic resonates with the prescriptions of manuals of civility and good manners, where speech is expected to remain controlled and properly formatted. It reflects a more implicit violence of institutional order, in which the boss’s voice, carrying the authority of law, acts upon bodies that have recently arrived from rural contexts and are being inserted into urban systems of labor. Shorthand (Stenografie) operates here as the mediating tool that enables this relation, translating dictated speech into an efficient writing system designed to absorb its speed. Equivalencias focuses on this intermediary space, where voice is transformed into document through repeated acts of formatting and reduction.