Visible

Calico Series #5

by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Christina MacSweeney (Translator), Marie NDiaye

Visible gathers six genre-defying works that blend text and images. Can text itself be an image? Can an abstract painting tell a complex story? This special large-format edition of the Calico Series is brimming with illustrations, memes, swirling mud drawings, and tattered family photographs alongside poems, reportage, and fiction by writers including Verónica Gerber Bicecci (tr. from Spanish Christina MacSweeney), Marie NDiaye (tr. from French Victoria Baena), and Yi SangWoo (tr. Emily Yae Won). Focusing on those whose full stories have yet to be told—the black Cuban singer Maria Martinez, a Polish family murdered in the holocaust, workers at a noodle shop in Busan, and the tallest man in recorded history—the authors, artists, and translators in this collection combine their talents to make visible what we could not previously see.

Genres: Art

180 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2022

Reviews

[Alli Cadle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are someone who is interested in photography and memory, artistic interpretation, or the interplay between text and image, you might enjoy this book. It's called Visible, but it's also about limitations in seeing and understanding. something I appreciated is the way the book made me think about the extra layer of translation.

Until this book, I hadn't heard of The Calico Series, which publishes biannual editions of translated literature. I picked this one up because the cover, with black circles over faces in what might be a family photo, reminded me of William E. Jones's film Killed. In Killed, Jones pulls together photos from FSA photographers that were rejected in the form of hole-punched negatives by program director Roy Stryker. It's a film that I think fits right in with the six works in Visible. I will definitely be looking for other Calico Series publications.

[Two Lines Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

In stores now!!

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book from Two Lines Press is a super-ambitious examination of the interplay between text, images, language, and meaning. I've never seen anything quite like it. Using drawings, photos, captions, short fiction, and poetry, this work shows how words and images can enhance and change one another in combination. Very cool stuff.

[Chad Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh translations (prose and poetry) from Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Marie NDiaye, Yi SangWoo, and others come together for a collection that specifically investigates the relationships between images and text in uncommon, eye-opening ways. In NDiaye’s “Step of a Feral Cat” (tr. by Victoria Baer), an obsession with a Nadar portrait of the 19th-century black Cuban singer Maria Martinez leads to a magnificent short story about fiction-making and possibility, exploitation and control. Monika Sznajderman’s contribution, an extract from a longer project called “The Pepper Forgers,” is also led cautiously by photographs. Sznajderman’s piece is, or becomes, “a symbolic story about life in the pre-Holocaust world” through the use of documentary photographs of family members she never knew, living in and running a boarding house that she never knew. A helpful line: “I only remember sunny days, although I know this is because Henryk, your uncle and the family photographer, only took out his camera when the sun was shining.” Rodrigo Flores Sanchez’s contribution is white text on black paper interspersed with haunting artworks that recall in their eeriness Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Wonderfully, the whole thing kicks off with an illustrated (hand lettering w/ drawings) piece by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated by Christina MacSweeney, which provides an illuminating (and fun!) framework for understanding how text and images interact: “Some words are incapable of forming and image” atop an image of the word FUTURE. The whole thing is very good. A sustained literary mediation on our image-drenched age.

[Chris]

These six stories are challenging, stretching the linear story and how we see, or, rather, what is “visible” at a given moment, from a given perspective.
I thought the stories were beautifully arranged, the first, serving as an introduction to the “project”, the last, working as a coda.
There was much inspiring in these pieces, the shifting perspective of Yi SanWoo, Marie Ndaiye’s quest to understand and present a historical figure, the photography of David Damoison.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection and intertwining of images and texts.