SILVIA PIO (edited by)

Collaborations between poets and artists have appeared in Margutte many times. We are glad to introduce another, featuring Richard Berengarten and Geneviève Guétemme, on three of Berengarten’s works.

Richard Berengarten is a regular host in Margutte (see his contributions here). Berengarten, formerly Burns, was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and University College London. He has lived in Italy, Greece, the USA and former Yugoslavia. His poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. It is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth and ambitiousness of themes, and formal variety and dexterity.

Genèvieve Guétemme, born in 1965 in the North of France, did her Art degree in Lille and her PhD in Aesthetics in Paris (La Sorbonne) exploring the idea of limits in contemporary arts.

Guétemme frequently works at the interfaces between drawing, photography and text, and is especially interested in combining genres and discovering new forms and combinations. She also collaborates with poets Jacques Jouet, Heather Dohollau, Béatrice Bonhomme and Stav Poleg. As a Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Education at the University of Orléans, her current research explores the relationship between photography and literature.

On 11 November 2015 Guétemme made a short film for the launch in Cambridge of Berengarten’s Notness/ Sonnets. The title, Notness, is an anagram of the word ‘Sonnets’. In fact the book is a sequence of one hundred sonnets composed between 1967 and 2013. The word ‘Metaphysical’ in the subtitle is a pointer to some of the tendencies and intentions in and surrounding the title.

The cinematic commentary by Geneviève Guétemme, which can be seen here, offers a series of subtle and unexpected visual dimensions. Her interpretations of the poems are works of art in their own right.

On 11 May 2017, during the launch of Richard Berengarten’s Changing in Cambridge, Guétemme presented eight collaborative drawings entitled Changes – Échanges (which now accompany this article).

Changing is Berengarten’s poetic homage to the I Ching, also known as the Yijing or the Chinese Book of Changes. See Prayer, prophecy and poetry: Richard Berengarten’s Changing.

A set of seventeen charcoal drawings will be published at the end of 2017 in the magazine Nu(e), established in Nice, France, in 1994 and directed by Béatrice Bonhomme and Hervé Bosio. A special issue will be dedicated to Berengarten’s The Blue Butterfly, a collection that sprang after the poet’s visit to the site of a massacre perpetrated in central Serbia in 1941.

Geneviève Guétemme states: «My research focuses on exploring the links between visual arts (drawing and photography) and contemporary poetry at the edge of migration studies. I am interested in the work of artists (photographers and poets) who explore the idea of otherness through interculturalism, feminism or statelessness.»

As stated before, the drawings in this article, entitled Changes – Échanges, were presented on 11 May 2017 during the launch of Richard Berengarten: Changing in Cambridge.

Links to other projects:

• Follow the fellow’s project: https://followthefellow.wordpress.com/
• Artists books: http://www.blurb.co.uk/user/gguetmm
• Geneviève Guétemme& Heather Dohollau :http://www.terreaciel.net/Genevieve-Guetemme-Heather#.VqknUHlGUis

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