Traces: 1873- Wordless maps
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.
If most of the project focussed on traces of London, this part brings the poets right in the heart of the project, by placing their words at the center of it all. Not to explain, decode, or interpret them (although I try and do this too)- but instead to exhibit them, in the materiality of a handwriting, as part of a visual project. After the topographic, the typographic.
I started with manuscripts of two poems I have focused on in my literary project, both composed during or after their London stay, and where traces of the metropolis can be read. But here again, what is being said is hidden, a whisper perceptible through discrete word choices, in the cacophony and the tumult of the grandiloquent city. Are you paying enough attention to follow them into the text?