The Walls Have Their Say

To mark the tenth anniversary of the May ’68 revolt, Niki Kanagini created a triptych titled Les murs ont la parole [The Walls Have Their Say] – “Write Your Own Slogan” (1978). The left side incorporated slogans taken from the walls of the Sorbonne that dated to the time of this French uprising, while visitors were called upon to write their own slogans on the accompanying two parts. This participatory installation was designed to be presented in a variety of different social settings, functioning as a societal barometer of sorts that would record the social positions and pronouncements of visitors. The piece was first presented in Stuttgart in 1979 as part of the group exhibition titled Artists Report: Mail-Art, curated by Angelika Schmidt and organised for the 9th International Congress of the International Association of Art (IAA / AIAP) that took “Art and Public” as its theme. To create the piece, Kanagini used works from her Blue Manuscripts series, painstakingly reworking them with successive layers of marker pen interventions on silkscreens, followed by further silkscreening to produce a seamless translucent surface.