In collaboration with the English Department, the Mexico Study Centre is pleased to be hosting a talk by a colleague from UCL (now based at Universidad de Santiago de Chile), Dr. Jèssica Pujol Duran. The event will take place next Wednesday, 19th February, 15:00-17:00 in Academie A7. Dr. Pujol's work examines interactions between Latin American and European avant-gardes in the 1970s and should be of wide appeal! Below you will find further details.
BEAU GESTE PRESS: A LIMINAL COMMUNITAS
ACROSS THE NEW AVANT-GARDES
ABSTRACT:
In this seminar paper I will examine how a few Latin American avant-garde artists
and poets in exile became part of Fluxus, an international constellation of artists whose ideas revitalised the concept of the avant-garde after the war. This movement became an active collaboration through the productions of the Beau Geste Press, which was co-founded by Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion and David Mayor in 1971 and lasted until 1976. The press, located in a farmhouse, not only published and disseminated the work of Cecilia Vicuña, Ulises Carrión, Claudio Bertoni, and Ehrenberg himself, but also operated as “a community of duplicators, printers and craftsmen” that replaced the concept of individual creation with a practice of communal production. I will refer to Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to contend that the Beau Geste Press, which represented the beginning and end of this communitas, developed in a space that was liminal on different levels: at the level of the subjective experience of exile; of artistic production, which can be inferred from their emphasis on procedural techniques over finished artistic products; and at the level of language, because they are Spanish-speaking authors in England, who turn a potential problem into hybrid forms.
Jèssica Pujol Duran (Barcelona, 1982) is a Postdoctoral researcher at Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Chile). Her project is on Spanish American Experimental Poetics in the 1970s and is funded by the National Funding for Scientific and Technological Development, Fondecyt. In 2016, she earned a PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London, entitled ‘From Experimental to Experimentalism: Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar in Paris 1963-1973’, supervised by Prof. Stephen Hart, Dr. Claire Lindsay and Dr. Florian Mussgnug. She was Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at UCL for three years; Associate Tutor at the University of Surrey in 2013/2014, and at Queen Mary University in 2014; Visiting Lecturer at Kingston University in 2016 and she has taught a master’s course at the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (USACH) on ‘Experimental Literature: From Naturalism to the Post-Avant-Garde’. She has published peer-reviewed articles and a chapter on Experimental Literature and Experimental Translation and attended several conferences on the field of comparative literature and Spanish American studies worldwide. In the UK she edits Alba Londres. Culture in Translation, a magazine that publishes Latin American poetry in translation in the UK.