Traces: 1873- Inverted world
For the last few years, I have been working on a project following the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud through London as they knew it in 1872-73. I followed their traces through the city, seeing it with their eyes, hearing the words they heard, mapping out the areas they frequented. It has been a fascinating poetic journey and I even caught glimpses of a forbidden London within their texts..
During this quest, I accumulates a growing stash of materials, debris of my research: old images of London, maps, dictionaries, and of course the poems I pored over day after day as I interrogated the secret languages concealed within.
So when I embarked on a journey to discover etching last year, I summoned my poets to come with me, and decided to use this cache of material as a guiding light through my experimentation. I didn’t know where I was going, or what the result would look like, but I wanted to assemble these traces of 1873 London into a visual exploration.
This is the result.
The places I followed the poets into were resolutely queer, traces of a subculture that existed even the nineteenth century. The Alhambra Theatre, which once stood in Leicester Square, and Charing Cross station, were both places where queer men found each others. The poets frequented both as they discovered this city they called “prudish with all the vices on offer”.
One of their poetic strategies for talking about sexuality in their work was writing inverted sonnets, the tercets on top of the quatrains, othering this most orthodox poetic form.
I decided to replicate their strategies on the images of the Alhambra and Charing Cross by inverting and solarizing the images, to reinvent the world and find the liminal spaces with it.