Alejandra Pizarnik or reading the visible and contemplating the legible

Abstract

Alejandra Pizarnik was an extraordinary observer. Her formal bet is part of a radically visual and transgressive tradition that questions itself –like one of the characters in Los poseídos entre lilas– about “the gift of the gaze”. The dadaist experiments, Breton's reflections on painting and Bataille's texts on the eye left traces in her writings. But his poetic images –which he called “visions”, following a slogan from Rimbaud– are also inspired by the hybrid figures of Bosch, Goya's Caprichos, Van Gogh's self-mutilation, Michaux's Mezcal drawings and the violence of Artaud's manuscripts. In addition to a disturbing aesthetic, Pizarnik takes tools and techniques from these artists. The following pages try to explore her writing laboratory as an atelier and editing room, exposing the materials with which she elaborates her work and her constructive principles of her poetics. The theoretical operation carried out by Pizarnik in the field of the image allows us to understand the plasticity of a writing that unfolds in a continuous slide between two languages.