“Poetry is not a project” is the proposal by UNR communicator and professor Clara Lopez Verrilli, which combines writing, painting, and public space.
At the corner of Salta and Paraguay streets, the word "verbo" appeared painted in black on a billboard. It was covered up, intervened with markers and pens, and torn off several times, but it reappears. What does it mean? Some passersby think it's a novel advertisement or a social experiment circulating on social media. Neighborhood merchants witnessed the word being painted at least five times, and some neighbors even recorded the scene.
This artistic proposal by social communicator and UNR professor Clara Lopez Verrilli, entitled "Poetry is not a project," interweaves writing, painting, and public space. The work continues at the eSTUDIOG Gallery, located at Catamarca 1427, where the intervention, featuring the street as its protagonist, is exhibited in video and photographs, alongside a series of paintings in the gallery. This creates a dialogue between what happens on the street and what happens in the gallery, expanding the boundaries of what we understand as a "poem."
According to the author, the starting point was reading the book "Writing" by Marguerite Duras, which already has more than fifty verbs on the first page. With this understanding that verbs move the story forward, advance a narrative, and create an image, she began underlining and writing them in pencil on the pages of a school notebook.
From that obsessive reading and searching, he moved on to syntactical analysis, marking subject, predicate, verb, direct and indirect object, and having doubts about what some words were because they operate differently in relation to the ones next to them. "I set myself the task of studying the syntactical and morphological construction of texts I would have liked to have written. It occurred to me that if I could decipher how they were constructed, I would be able to write mine like that," he says.
That idea grew, and the notebook became too small. She moved on to loose sheets of A4, A3, A2, and cardstock, and began assembling them until she realized she needed a different scale. She moved from pencil to acrylic, and from there to broad brush, the six-part, and the street. Inspired by Dorothea Lasky's essay of the same name, which argues that poems aren't projected: they grow, like living things sprouting from the ground, Lopez Verrilli brought her experience to public space.
First, she went on a walk in search of sextuples. She thought about how to connect it to the gallery, like the lines of syntactic analysis, and chose the corner of Paraguay and Salta. There, she painted the word "verb," and inside the gallery are all the other elements that make up the poems she would have liked to have written: wall paintings of the words, the syntactic analysis, and a television projecting the audiovisual recording of the painting onto the street. There, you can see people walking by who stop and ask: "What's going on? Is this an advertisement? Is this an experiment for social media?" "It's good when these strange situations happen that take you out of the ordinary and pull back your glasses a little," the artist says. Others who enter the gallery say: "Ahh, this has to do with the sign on the corner." The image also circulated on social media, so some people saw it and said: "I found the sign," with a feeling of discovery.
Sextuples have a mass-market logic, generally with an advertising purpose in public spaces, but here there's a completely opposite objective: artistic. Most people think it's an advertisement. "It's hard to think of something that doesn't have to do with selling," says the communicator, who believes it relates to the possibilities of reading an image, interpreting it, linking it to something, associating it with other interpretations. In this case, there are differences with the advertising image because it's not printed; it's handcrafted and constantly changing. Nor is it a work that is quickly associated with the traditional artistic code, but rather requires effort.
The artist explains that during the minutes she's painting on the street, she focuses solely on that, but from the opposite angle, she makes an audiovisual and photographic record of what's happening around her and, in turn, takes notes on the conversations that arise, like "a chronicle of the life of the poster on the street." When she looks at it later, she finds scenes that are hallmarks of the era, of the city. From the way the containers are positioned, a cadet passing by on a motorcycle with his backpack, someone on a state-of-the-art skateboard, but also a Renault 12, a dog, a runner. "That's the repertoire of actions that coexist with the work," she says.
This exhibition has the uniqueness of opening a conversation with a field that isn't purely artistic, but rather that of the street. The artist captures that spontaneity, which also begins to form part of the work. At one point, the sign was torn off; other words began to appear underneath, and between the angle of the V, there was a smile. Currently, there are four or five layers of paper between the torn off paper, the paint, and the distant letters. In this sense, neatness isn't a search; on the contrary, it's about revealing everything that happened.
That is to say, different situations arose throughout the process that modified the work. For the author, these changes are also part of the piece. “The street offered me its unexpected events and everything that happens when someone else is given the opportunity to intervene, tear out, cover up, look at, break, cross out, and all the actions that reside within a verb.”
At a time when public education and the areas most closely linked to the social and humanistic spheres are being criticized negatively, the professor emphasizes that her training at a public university is central to how she produces and positions herself in any work, artistic, or professional setting, "because I am constantly influenced by what I learned and what the university offered me." She feels that one of the most rewarding aspects of her teaching and artistic practice is finding a different way of reading, viewing, and connecting texts, and that is what she seeks to share.
Lopez Verrilli is part of the management and production team of the Secretariat of Culture and Education of the Municipality of Rosario and is a member of the Center for Studies in Art and Contemporaneity of the Universidad Nacional de RosarioThe exhibition can be visited during the month of October at eSTUDIOG, Galería Dominicis, Catamarca 1427, Wednesday to Friday from 16 to 20 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 14 p.m. with free admission.
Journalist: Victoria Arrabal/Photographer: Majo Badra