The visual poetry of Ana Čavić

By Mario Flecha

Earlier in the year we presented you with the visual and poetic work of the late Argentinian poet Ana María Uribe and also of Colombian poet and visual artíst Gloria Posada. This time we are happy to briefly introduce the visual and eclectic work of an Slovenian auteure: Ana Čavić

For the VII Jafre Biennial in 2013 Ana Čavić presented a performance called You make me sick, an action based on the memories of her childhood that consisted of eating flowers until she vomited.

She studied at Slade School of Fine Art and is the founder, with Renée O’Drobinak, of Ladies of the Press. Her poetic work develops between reality and fiction creating narratives with images and texts that seek to unveil her cultural identity but also drinks from many other artistic fountains.

Čavić folds a page in half and cuts out pictures of animals, people and objects. Unfolding the page will reveal that her cutting produces a visual poem while the process for her collage calligram is to use printed words from newspapers, cutting them up into letters, words, sentences, and punctuation marks. She has entire envelopes full of cut-ups like these, from which she composes a
poem spontaneously, very slowly and methodically and in a single sitting until she feels the poem is finished. 

Thus her poems are sometimes a juxtaposition of mirrored images that summon a fantasy realm in a labyrinth of images and words.

In her recent book, Mithopoeias, published by Rosfrei, she creates an artist book made of collages on photographs using the technique known as calligrams. What Čavić does is to use a well established literary poetic tradition, the calligram, invented by the French avant garde poet Gillaume Appollinaire in 1918.

Ana Čavić is a Ljubljana-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, poet and researcher into performance publishing practices. She works across different fields and media, including works on paper, artists’ publications, performances, digital poetry, animation. She is currently doing a PhD at Southampton University @uni_southampton_wsa @wsa_phd. She is cofounder of @ladiesofthepress. More of her work can be seen and appreciated on her Instagram account customeyesd – Ana Čavić