Fig

by Caroline Bergvall

Published 1 January 2005

FIG is the second installment of the ongoing series Goan Atom. It is a colllection of 12 poetic pieces written between 1996 and 2004. They have each previously been produced as off-page collaborations or text-installations. This range of artistic and poetic contexts and the compositional processes that result from these is a crucial aspect of the goanatom poetics represented in FIG. Each piece has been carefully rethought and twelve short prefatory notes have been written and developed especially for the book. They function as an additional textual layer, a poetic dimension in their own right. The pieces in FIG explore the connections between the materialities of written or inscriptive language and the materialities of human physicality. Language inscribed in the speaking, listening, writing body. This includes the pursuit of physical and sexual imaginaries, bilingual and translative poetics, time-led and context-specific writings, textual and spoken patterns of misrecognition. It is one of the premises of FIG that the poetic texts are written with an accent and with body. The book's drawings and photographic material add to the traffic between verbal and visual textualities.