How does writing become image, and how do images travel like letters? This introductory talk traces visual and typographic poetics across languages and media. From concrete poems to mail art and participatory experiments, we’ll move through a wide constellation of makers—from the Noigandres group (Augusto de Campos—Brazil; Haroldo de Campos—Brazil; Décio Pignatari—Brazil) to Juan Luis Martínez (Chile), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), Clemente Padín (Uruguay), Ulises Carrión (Mexico), and Mirtha Dermisache (Argentina), alongside key figures such as Eugen Gomringer (Bolivia/Switzerland), Mary Ellen Solt (United States), Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland), Bob Cobbing (United Kingdom), and Johanna Drucker (United States).
Rather than a “greatest hits” timeline, we’ll focus on small gestures—spacing, cuts, erasures, overtyping, and layout—as methods for reading an alternative history of visual poetry, where sometimes an erasure and a resonance reveal more than the word. In dialogue with correspondence networks and the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives, we’ll ask how poems become echo-chains: carried by distance, shaped by delay, and completed in the viewer’s interpretation.
No prior knowledge needed.
Echo[es]: traces in a grid unfolds at UB Art Galleries as a spring program of lectures, hands-on workshops, and a participatory mail exchange, bringing together visual poetry, experimental writing, mail art, and typewriter art. Framed in dialogue with Martha Jackson in Paris and Robert Creeley: Active Complement, the project draws on traditions of artistic correspondence to ask how networks form through text, image, and “slow communication” and are shaped by distance, delay, and return.
Echo[es] resonates in three movements. Across March and April, a series of public lectures and hands-on workshops in visual poetry and typewriter art punctuate the season—some offered in person and virtually— act as activations creating shared moments for learning, making, and conversation. In addition to that stream, a postal exchange begins to circulate: a curated selection of works from Buffalo, Latin America, and the international community enters the postal system, travels along branching routes, arrives in waves, and gathers momentum as the correspondence network grows.
By May, the gathered correspondence and workshop creations materialize as a collective installation: the echo-chain taking physical form as a living wall in the 2nd-floor gallery at the UB Center for the Arts. It will read as an accumulative, momentary palimpsest—poems, images, and traces shaped by latency (that postal “lag”), by what arrives quickly, what arrives late, and what returns transformed. At the intersection of Martha Jackson in Paris and Robert Creeley: Active Complement the wall lets visitors read the network as it surfaces: some intentions sharpen in transit, others are lost in branching routes, and others reappear only when they finally take shape, in display, in public, as an echo.
Program Date: March 4, 2026