Poetics of Resistance – POSVERSO biennial – videopoetry curation by Alejandro Thornton
The formidable Argentinian-based POSVERSO BIENNIAL presents a rich selection of poets from the digital media / literary / electronic / visual poetry world in a multitude of events and locations. It is perhaps the most historic event of its kind today. By that I mean it centres not only on different types of avant-garde poetry (digital, visual, performative etc), but also expands on the potential of poetry and how artists can confront political turmoil and abuse. How political statement can be visualised through words and images. If you picked one event to find the very best, the most explosive of this particular mix, it would be in Argentina at this time in world history.
As the curatorial statement by Silvio De Gracia for the First Biennial, states:
‘Experimental poetry is not an aseptic or alienated language, but a language that, as the Mexican poet César Espinosa stated, is made of “corrosive signs.” In the case of Latin America, starting in the 1970s, the practice of experimental poetry took on an eminently political character, which not only aimed at the creation of new forms of reading and writing, but also at the diversion and subversion of the normalized discourses of dictatorial contexts. Here are included the proposals of historical poets such as Clemente Padín, Edgardo Antonio Vigo or Guillermo Deisler, but also of other creators who, without registering within the specific field of experimental poetry, develop practices in which they seek to renew artistic repertoires, to the time to transform or challenge social and political conditions.
POSVERSO takes up this tradition of an experimental poetic current, which is connected to scenarios of confrontation and resistance, and which is oriented towards the construction of other meanings, other narratives, other ways of inhabiting the world. For POSVERSO, experimental poetry is an inexhaustible field in which games with words and various writing signs are exceeded, to drift towards forms of intersemiotic translation, in which verbal signs are transmuted or transferred to non-verbal signs, or from one system of signs to another; for example, from verbal writing to music, dance, painting, video. This intersemiotic character is what links experimental poetry with the approaches of the conceptualist movement, especially with the proposal of the Fluxus Art intermedias developed by Dick Higgins. Poetry is everything. Hybridizations, crossings, translations configure the productive matrix of a series of poetic processes, whose realizations can be found not only in the field of experimental poetry, but within the expanded horizons of the visual arts, music, performance, video.’
The main exhibition Poetics of Resistance “Poéticas de la resistencia”curated by Silvio De Gracia and designed by Ana Montenegro opened at MACA Museum of Contemporary Argentine Art on October 18th in Junin. Primarily showcasing practitioners from Latino backgrounds such as Javier Robledo, Clemente Padin, Joyce Ribeiro and Alejandro Thornton, many Spanish (such as Bartolomé Ferrando) and European artists (Jaap Blonk, Montenegro Fisher) are also featured.
[Incidentally the term Poetics of Resistance was also made famous by Argentine artist and human rights activist Marcelo Brodsky. As a poetics of political intervention he redefines journalistic images of political events through his art.]
Through presenting at VideoBardo 2012, I have met some of the leading Argentinian media poets such as Claudia Kozak (showing with Rodolfo Mata (México) and Michael Hurtado (Perú) in an electronic poetry event on the 29th November. And, Javier Robledo presented a VideoBardo screening in the Poetics of Resistance event, which I am pleased to see.
Just a few of the locations at POSVERSO.
With more than a hundred activities: workshops, conferences, exhibitions, pre-events, (and including projects worldwide such as on mail art to those in public spaces, with titles such as ‘Resisting the Present’ and Marginalia – Notes, visions and writings on the edges) this is an impressive cultural event with a strong selection of artists. You can see how much planning has gone into this biennial by checking out the different locations on offer.
The whole biennial closes Friday the 20th December at the Hotel DADA (with a concert online) and with seven more events to come there is still a lot to see. For example, Paulo Bruscky (b: 1949) the Brazilian multidisciplinary artist whose pioneered mail art in the 1960s. Influenced by avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and later connected to Fluxus in the 1970s, it mustn’t be forgotten that mail art could circumvent the authorities in terms of expressing political freedom during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Bruscky (1976)“In Mail Art, art has reclaimed its principal functions: information, protest, and denunciation.”
Latin America (back) Paulo Bruscky, 1976.
Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junin.
Videopoetry
There will also be a videopoetry event at the Centro de Capacitación y Cultura ATSA, Junín curated by Alejandro Thornton, who some of you may know is one of the artists featured in the poetry anthology / screening publication Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow from Poem Film Editions. His aim behind the screening is to bring videopoetry to the streets.
SOS, Augusto de Campos, 2000.
Artists include: ‘Oskar Fischinger (Alemania), Walter Ruttmann (Alemania), Augusto de Campos (Brasil), Decio Pignatari (Brasil), Tom Konyves (Canadá), Montenegro-Fischer (UK-Chile), Sarah Tremlett (UK), Tulio Restrepo (Colombia), Tatiana Gaviola (Chile), Belén Gache, Gonzalo Aguilar (author of leading publication on Argentinian Cinema), Ivana Vollaro, Rubén Grau, Ro Barragán, Rosa Gravino, Paula Pellejero, Facundo Díaz and Alejandro Thornton amongst others’.
Organic Fragments – White, Paula Pellejero, 2024.
Really a very exciting collection of works, and I wish I could be there to see a rare example of Walter Ruttmann’s abstract cinematic film – Lichtspiel Opus I (1921). I am honoured that my poetry film Solstice Sol Invictus has been included in this really impressive group and particularly with the legendary artist Augusto de Campos. I have added below a still from SOS (2000) a video with rotating texts and repeating vocalising; also of course reminiscent of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema. I should add that it hasn’t yet been revealed to me which are the exact films being screened, so this may not be in the final show.
In Solstice Sol Invictus I created the concept (words, visuals, sound) of the film for Lucy English’s The Book of Hours project, with the theme of course registering the mediaeval and reflective, temporal feel of the original Books of Hours, but with the sun and its passage through the year as a central theme. I came up with the (verbal, visual and sound) concept and wrote the first four verses and Lucy the second.
Solstice Sol Invictus, Sarah Tremlett (concept and poet, and Lucy English poet), 2018.
I also made another poetry film for this project (a natural pair) entitled Summer Solstice (with old 35 mm footage of a California beach). Solstice Sol Invictus effectively uses the screen as a moving canvas, showing the changes in light as the sun passes through the seasons, reflecting on light, hope, faith and solar time. I also have referenced earlier painters and their solar depictions and in the latest version I have included these at the end. I was influenced by: Max Ernst’s Black Sun 1927–8; Vincent Van Gogh’s Sower with Setting Sun, 1888; Ambassador of Autumn, 1922 by Paul Klee, which has haunted me with its tonal, horizontal gradations, also influencing the dynamic structure of Mr Sky (2018), (another poetry film with Lucy English) and a later abstract landscape Spiral Motif in Green, Violet, Blue and Gold: The Coast of the Inland Sea (1950) by British artist Victor Pasmore, 1908–98.
Black Sun, Max Ernst, 1927.
FOR A COMPLETE OVERVIEW GO TO:
https://posversobienal.com.ar/
