Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.To the south-east of Mexico City\u2019s Centro Hist\u00f3rico is Mercado de Sonora. It is a sprawling, heady mix of all the usual things you might find at a large city market: fresh produce, homeware items, clothing. But what it\u2019s really known for is what\u2019s sold around the periphery. Towards the end of the market\u2019s longest thoroughfare is where you will find traders in Mexico\u2019s traditional medicine and the occult.It\u2019s a place where pre-Hispanic, Mesoamerican traditional practices overlap with Catholicism. Judas figurines, intended to be burned or otherwise disfigured, sell in large numbers, as do decorations related to Day of the Dead celebrations. You might find dried snakes to treat cancer, or dried skunks to \u201cstrengthen\u201d the blood. Crucifixes made of sweet-smelling Ocote wood hang beside chains of garlic to ward off evil. And deer\u2019s eyes protect against the evil eye. It is a place where people of all ages and classes brush shoulders with one another, and where there remains a thriving, illegal trade in wild animals.Its position on the fringes and overt criminal activity make it an almost impossible place to make pictures. But that was no hindrance to Mexican photographer Tania Franco Klein, whose latest work brings the dark magic and incense-laden promises of the market back into the enclosed, personal spaces she has become known for.At the heart of Franco Klein\u2019s multidisciplinary practice is an exploration of modern anxiety. Her deeply researched, elaborately staged photographic worlds are rich in psychological drama and existential dread.Now based in Mexico City, she worked abroad for years. Travelling alone and living a nomadic lifestyle made it difficult for her to cast models for her immersive, cinematic work. But it also removed a potential anxiety. \u201cI\u2019m a recovering people-pleaser, so it makes things easier,\u201d Franco Klein says. \u201cI always have this inner fight when I am creating a character \u2014 trying to please the person in front of me \u2014 and I eliminate that conversation from the work in self-portraits. I didn\u2019t want to deal with other people\u2019s ideas of how the work should look in the universe I was creating.\u201dWhereas previous projects had seen Franco Klein photographing herself in transitory, liminal spaces such as trains and motels \u2014 hinting at ideas of metamorphosis, as well as escape and isolation \u2014 Mercado de Sonora is set in a domestic space, explicitly in Mexico. And it isn\u2019t herself she\u2019s cast in front of the lens, but rather her mother and grandmother.Arguably, this is a form of extended self-portraiture. One that examines heritage, womanhood, nationality and her inherited beliefs and traumas. \u201cThe way I work is intrinsically related to my biggest fears,\u201d Franco Klein says. \u201cGrowing up in Mexico as a young girl in the 1990s, I experienced a creepy world. I was born to be hyperaware. As a five-year-old girl, if I saw a man look at me, I thought, \u2018He wants to hurt me.\u2019 I had such a vulnerability to the world when I just wanted to be contained. With my work, I realised how much this translated when people would ask about my interiors, the feelings of collapse and containment. I thought, \u2018Oh, I guess all of it came from my fears.\u2019\u201dThe interior worlds she creates are indeed creepy and claustrophobic, pregnant with symbolism, much like the mise en sc\u00e8ne of filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock. The psychological drama and interior conflicts of their characters are made manifest by the chosen colour palettes. Here, dark reds, greens and yellows feel oppressive, nauseating even. Shadows are heavy and darkness creeps in from the edges of the frame. The fragmented scenes that we are presented with feel hallucinatory and nightmarish. Dislocated body parts appear, a lock of hair. Rituals are played out. A voodoo doll full of pins lies garrotted by red cable, an egg is drawn over the black-wigged head of a woman as part of a limpia, a traditional healing practice to remove negative energies. There are animals. A piglet (presumably alive) stands on a red table, staring down the camera, cornered by red walls. A crocodile (presumably dead) brushes up against a green velvet sofa. In every frame there seem to be clues, signifiers of something otherworldly.\u201cWe spend our whole lives trying to bridge the gap between ourselves and the world,\u201d Franco Klein says. This search for connection is at the heart of her artistic practice, and within the intimate world of Mercado de Sonora, she seems to be reaching back \u2014 along her ancestral line, through her mother and grandmother, and back through her country\u2019s pre-colonial history. The result is a set of images that are fraught, tense, expressive and poetic. They hint at how our lives have become ever more isolated and fragmented, while we still strive for attachment and deeper meaning. \u201cMy main character is always emotion,\u201d she says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter where you\u2019re from. You know how it feels to be anxious, you know how it feels to feel lonely. In the human condition, we can experience solitude, but we don\u2019t have to feel alone.\u201d \u201cMercado de Sonora\u201d and other work by Tania Franco Klein can be seen at the ROSEGALLERY booth at Photo LondonFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.To the south-east of Mexico City\u2019s Centro Hist\u00f3rico is Mercado de Sonora. It is a sprawling, heady mix of all the usual things you might find<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":308699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-308698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":308700,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308698\/revisions\/308700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}