INTRATEXTUAL
Visual poetry in the Contemporary Art Workshops
Despite its literal meaning, visual poetry is not exclusively linked to the gaze. The breadth of its margins—and therefore the difficulty of defining it—is because in this type of poetry, the word acquires a specific dimension and density. Beyond the hierarchy of meaning, visual poetry enables different phenomena that converge in language to establish a network of links and affections that does not depend exclusively on conceptual aspects. In this respect, the body—in its different meanings and connotations—determines the sphere of action of this intersection between the artistic and the verbal. Using innumerable resources, visual poetry opens the horizons of the lexicon to the ups and downs of the concrete and the sensorial.
The exercises proposed for this visual poetry exhibition with members of the TACO Contemporary Art Workshops community are drawn from a class/workshop held throughout a year and a half of work. With a range of backgrounds, ages and origins, the creators selected for this project were forced to cope with a two-fold challenge: tackling a hybrid subject —visual poetry—whose systematic, organized study is still in its infancy in Mexico. In contrast to the interest, demand, and a certain Mexican tradition of pairing the arts and literature, the material and documentary funds required to organize an academic review of this creative phenomenon are still scarce or disperse in this part of the world. However, this obstacle became a virtue, since dispensing with a hegemonic, overarching story meant that each artist created their own genealogies to suit their interests.
The dynamics and inertia of each creative process pose a second challenge. Each of the exhibitors is completely au fait with their area of training and the specialized tools of their respective disciplines. Coordinating accumulated experience in a field as dissimilar and anomalous as that of visual poetry involves pushing the boundaries of personal work to a greater or lesser extent. Nevertheless, curiosity always prevails, which, in each collaboration, and because of the involvement of language, guides the transition from the merely graphic or retinal towards a complexity capable of drawing on different contexts, mental tones and worldviews which, in the different works produced, create genuine intertextual warps.
Given the current adverse circumstances for public and community exhibition, staging a show in which language and visuality are hybridized involves a final reflection: What or for whom are we staging an exhibition? Far from confidently answering this question, doubt enables us to engage in a liberating degree of trial and uncertainty. In keeping with this spirit of exploration, TACO proposes an exhibition of visual poetry in a museum specializing in prints to direct curatorial attention towards the physical supports of the printing and publication of a piece of writing. However, this center should not be understood as an academic or a historical review, but as an artistic one, in which publishing acts as an intermediate zone between words and images. Accordingly, and beyond the principles of clarity and legibility, visual poetry addresses the craft of publishing from an aesthetic perspective coupled with its recreational possibilities.
In short, the effort that drives a visual poetry project such as INTRATEXTUAL resembles an essay with several voices and writings; an indefinite, wandering essay, yet one which at the same time focuses on exploring different states and territories of the text to explore what other sensations and experiences emerge during the act of reading.
Vanessa García Lembo: VISUAL POETRY, FRAGMENTATION.
Maribel Portela: THE TRIBE AND THE BODIES.
Rodrigo Flores Herrasti: OBIRE
Sergio Ricaño: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA AS A REALITY DEVICE