Iñaki Bonillas travels to Cape Town from Mexico in the week preceding the opening of You to Me, Me to You, an exhibition curated by Francisco Berzunza in which his works The Return to the Origin 5, 6, 7, 8 (2010/2023) feature.

Bonillas' time at A4 is one of preliminary research and reciprocal curiosity; engaging with artists from the local ecology at their studios and at the foundation, sharing his practice and insights in informal exchanges, an interview on RAQ Radio (streamed live from the exhibition opening), and a conversation included in the You to Me, Me to You wayfinder.

The following is an excerpt from the latter – an exchange between Bonillas (I.B.), Josh Ginsburg (J.G.), and Francisco Berzunza (F.B.) held in person on 5 June 2023:

I.B. In The Return to the Origin, I basically returned to the origin of every document I had inherited. With the help of a musician, I was annotating each of the musical notes my father had improvised on the guitar. We built scores that could be played by anyone who could read music – we would always have the score. The same process of rewinding, or reversing back to the origin occurred with the photographs, and I retyped the paragraphs describing his more glorious achievements. The VHS film was reverse-engineered into a cinematic film. This ended up, coincidentally, being a project about the frontiers of the technical aspects of these material objects I had inherited, some of whose origins themselves were about to disappear, such as VHS, and cassette – these were on the cusp of having their production methods disappear, becoming the memory of the memory.

The works behaved as hinges that opened or closed the past. 

J.G. Translation comes with loss, slippages, opportunities. You’re constructing these memories, not for them to be pure, but that they create an electrical circuit, close the loop, set the signal moving. Are you translating it or are you creating a condition where we experience it as neither this, nor that, or something in between?

I.B. I am always asking this of myself when working with memories that were begun by someone else, amplifying an echo, where is my voice located, here?

J.G. A perfect translation is reversible, like mathematics. Translation in language aspires to perfect reversibility but it is not. Your work, as the hinges that you described earlier, create a third, in between.