Augusto De Campos
About
Created in close collaboration with Montreal poet Steve Savage, this project is a tribute to the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos, one of the inventors of concrete or "verba-voco-visual" poetry. We produced a series of posters visualizing the process employed by Savage to translate an original text by de Campos into six languages. During the exhibition in New York, three posters were displayed on the wall. Some 60 posters were shown to visitors on the ground.
The method of translation was to replace each letter of a given text with a word or a group of words. The variations from one language to the next depended on the frequency of the letters in each language. For the graphic version, six elements representing the first three letters of Augusto de Campos and the three pages required for translation formed six images, which were combined in multiple ways to produce some 60 variations in black and white.
Exhibition
In 2011, the poster project was presented in New York at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. There were also works by Bibi Calderaro, Deric Carner, Brendan Fernandes and Rossana Martinez.
