This “purity of drawing” was something Oscar Murillo wanted to capture in Frequencies. He first began the project back in 2013, in collaboration with sociologist Clara Dublanc. Since then, children aged 10-16 in countries including the UK, US, Brazil, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden and Turkey have drawn and doodled on canvases while at school. The results are canvasses that are densely layered with slogans, motifs, names, shapes and drawings, reflecting both the conscious and the unconscious minds of the children that created them. “They are so rich and full of vitality,” says Murillo. “You have these kids in this very feverish desire to download information, no matter how trivial.”
Though the children were aware they were participating in a project, by keeping the canvas there for a long period of time, Murillo believes it became familiar enough to capture their unconscious minds, too. “They’re touching this thing on daily basis, it’s a [piece of] furniture, you know,” he says.
The name of the project, Frequencies, refers to the many diversities it reveals, whether geographical, socio-economic, political – and through his thousands of collaborators, he hopes to capture things he would never be able to himself. “As an artist, one of the things that has been fundamental to me is travel and geographical research but I know my limits. I know that it doesn’t matter how much I want to connect to a place I’m doing it through a very specific filter.” The canvasses contain local cultural symbols and differences but there are many commonalities, too. Certain names – Ronaldo, Beyoncé, One Direction – appear again and again, and there are familiar recurring motifs – hearts, skulls, flowers.
“This mark-making that one sees is truly a reflection of the last decade in a way, and what’s interesting with that is that you can see a tremendous amount of culture being homogenised,” says Murillo. “You see how social media and technology has been able to seep through and just create this kind of homogeny, which is frightening.”