Infusoria report on AVS television

I finally got home to see it long, long after you all posted it on facebook, you famous filmstars you... there's an English transcript below.



Vanessa: The first days of summer also mark the beginning of the Literaire Lente [‘Literary Springtime’ festival] this week in Ghent. If you’re up for a king-size portion of culture, there is a whole range of literary activities to choose from. The infusoria exhibition in the Zilverhof for example, which focuses on visual poetry.

Jelle: ‘Infusoria’ is actually the word for little, microscopic water creatures, but in this case it refers to an exhibition with work by seventeen female poets from three continents. The intention of Helen White, the curator, was to show that all sorts of things have been happening in visual poetry since the seventies, and particularly in work by women. It is a whole different way of looking at poetry and what poetry, and by extension visual poetry, can mean.

Vanessa: Don’t come here expecting readings from poetry books. What you will find is a creative and playful treatment of poetry.

Helen: This is a little series about the different layers you find in language. So on the surface of course there is the semantic level, the meaning of the words, but just by the way you write, using handwriting or typing or with crossings out or whatever, you get different layers of meaning. It is a kind of body language in addition to the semantic language, the meanings. I have worked with lots of different layers to try and convey that. I often work with illegible texts. There are little fragments of a poem on each of the pebbles, which is an attempt to say the same thing.

Angela: These nine poems are part of a longer piece called ‘Rule of Three.’ There are seventy- eight visual poems like this in that series and they’re designed to be eventually printed on tarot cards. I’m very very interested in working with found text and found image, so the image that appears throughout these – the bivalves, the shells – they come from a Creative Commons image that I found on the internet. The little poem that’s off to the side here I found in spam in my e-mail at one point so I pulled that out.

Vanessa: Infusoria is open until Sunday, which is the end of the Literaire Lente. On Thursday you can also go and see poetic performances in the Logos Tetrahedron. You can find all the information here [on the Krikri website].