Los Canarios Exhibition

14th November – 15th December 2014

In this exhibition Francesca Phillips shows her artistic sensibility with an anthropological survey on the native population of the Canary Islands, the Guanches. On show are intense portraits of people of different ages and sex, involving us in a virtual reality of their world, in the traces of a past so hard fought for their physical and cultural survival.

Great inventors, the Guanches developed a complex language based on whistles, still known and practiced, as they needed a means of distance communication in the steep valleys of these volcanic islands in the ocean. In this amazing language Francesca Phillips has made a documentary of intense involvement, entitled Written in the Wind, which will be screened in the gallery during the exhibition to give us the chance to know ‘El Silbo ‘, the whistled language of the Guanches, and the efforts to save it for new generations.

Text by Massimo Prampolini