Carteleria Poetica

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Poesia T/47 (p. 19) Guillem Viladot

Faithful to the visual culture of our times, the Basque author Ainize Txopitea offers us a series of poster-images which are, to a certain degree, visual poems that share a current subject: violence. Sign and fate of our age, social, political, sexual, informative, cultural and counter-cultural violence has become our shadow accompanying us at any time and everywhere.

The artist, receptive to our daily and anonymous shouts, unmasks motivated historical disasters in the twinkling of an eye, creating a language or a “Langu(im)age”, which is a chronicle of desolated and violated worlds. Ainize images produce a visual chronicle of critique and denounce; a visual writing of protest against violence of any type, against the spirit’s death and against the notion of art understood in compartments of separate disciplines.

Txopitea’s “Cartelería Poética” includes 24 posters and it opens up its doors with an epigraph by Joan Brossa that refers to the eternal dilemma of tempus fugit and the importance of getting the “essential things” at the first glimpse. The author locates its spectators within this belief, so important by the avant-garde artists of all times, by using mainly a visual language. And by just taking a look at these posters we can recognize the speed at which certain contents are emitted and perceived. This makes possible to transmit a series of sensations and emotions which are related to the thematic of violence with a minimal verbal syntax focused in lexical variants but making us paying attention to color and a selection of icons from popular culture.

The minimal verbal syntax of these posters, although static, acquires a degree of dynamism that is in consonance with the graphic images of the poems. An outstanding aspect is for example, the combination of simple verbal games of associative and dissimilative nature, which gives body to the visual content in which they are inserted. We can read for instance in two different posters: M ATAME and MATAMATA-.

There are several lexical combinations such as: Kill me (MATAME), or Tie me (ATAME) and Kill Kill (MATA), Tie, Tie (ATA), Love (AMA). At first we may think that the author is evoking in us a locus amoenus of love and mysticism but in the whole context these verbal games acquire a critical and demystifying tone against the exploitation of certain stereotypes produced by the mass media (film industry, consumerist propaganda, etc.). The verbal components employed in this series of posters are a recurrent element that reinforces the central theme of her critique against violence.

With regards to the visual aspect of these images, the technique of collage becomes a functional element in relation to the theme of violence, creating a fast and sharp sort of pace. Another technique, the accumulation of elements, icons, objects in a single image, acts in a similar functional way, increasing a degree of tension. In addition, the dissimilar nature of objects and icons included, reinforces a sense of chaos and urban noises, basic condition of today’s human being. Another compositional and graphic element, original in these posters that emphasizes vertical and tense territories is the use of a visual background composed of pixels, squares, and black and white dots. This evidences not only a techno-graphic awareness but also a thematically functional visual writing.

Another significant element of this visual writing stands out by the recurrent use of chromatic contrasts such as –black and white and black and red-. These visual contrasts stress the theme of violence. Passion, sensuality (symbolized in the myth of Lauren Bacal), sex, blood, death (the gas children and the nazi’s swastika), pain and incomprehension (Fridha), terrorism, Iraq (Bush), violence on the streets, anonymous voices in protest (graffiti), are only some of the main messages emitted in these image collages.

The first visual poem of this series is “Ser Palabra” (To be Word), where violence acts as a weapon to our external senses: sight, smell, taste. The woman’s face of the poem is shut up. She cannot speak, she cannot see, and she cannot smell. Also, the absence of color in the poem reinforces, in this case, the theme of violence. The scissors in the mouth and nose of the woman and the letters covering her eyes can be interpreted here as an omnipresent and repressive social apparatus. This visual poem is a poem of urgency, panic, pain, and also of the death of the spirit. It is a poem in black and white with a crossword as a background, with spaces in black and white to fill out; spaces that are symbolic of young people making decisions and pastimes stepping at us with the sign of a crisis. The same concept of crossword acts as a leitmotif of the “Cartelería Poética” offering us a world to decipher in verbal-visual codes.

As we can see, in these poems the author does not use the attractive element of nostalgia evoking wonderful past or lost paradises. These images pretend to be a chronicle of the barbaric acts –individual or collective- of our historical times charged with the multiple signs of violence, emptiness, pain and desperation. The death of the spirit and the death of the body present themselves as a compulsory result of our acts that are neither fecund nor natural, filling out the black and white spaces of the crosswords/world that we are living in.

The main theme of these posters is not new neither the visual techniques used by the author. By using materials and techniques common to the visual arts, she “speaks” to us about one of the biggest crises of our epoch. Fragmentation and multiplicity operate as ethic and aesthetic elements of her visual writing. What the author offers us is neither a visual nor a verbal delight to escape from the daily conflicts. She is not interested in a visual locus amoenus but in a recyclable and significant space that in just a few seconds offers us critical, esthetic and political flashes, about dark aspects of our world dominated by stress and emptiness.

The author following Joan Brossa and other pioneers in this interdisciplinary and hybrid language uses several languages to produce a synaesthetic message which includes more than only one language, verbal or conceptual. Her visual poems are away from gender and genre limitations and do not impose limits to our perception, which “speaks” to us through a variety of languages such as color, image, graphic techniques, and words.

As a complementary reading to her “Cartelería Poética” it is necessary to see her web page, especially the section entitled “Experimental Poetry”: http://www.cyberpoetry.net/web_content/menu.html . In this site we are offered visual, cybernetic and kinetic poems open to lexical and therefore semantic variants. But these poems in order to exist do need the physical participation of the reader. At the beginning we see a static matrix of letters that can be activated by clicking a bottom and we can stop this activation at any moment by clicking the bottom again. When we stop it, at that precise moment we materialize a unique reading, and poem by deactivating other readings, and other poems. In this writing, time and space are two determining factors of the semantics of the poem. Mobility has become here an essential valence.

Behind this poetic production the author apply principles of the theory of Chaos and of Fractal Geometry, communicating among other things, an intrinsic conception of the mechanics of the universe as something open and dynamic but at the same time with certain patrons and order beneath Chaos.

Without any doubts Ainize Txopitea has in her artistic career a wide repertoire of visual writings, being Fractal Writing, a pioneer in the Hispanic poetic world.

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Laura López Fernández
laura.lopez-fernandez@canterbury.ac.nz
University of Canterbury
New Zealand