A logic of extravagance: About Conjunto Vacío by Ver{onica Gerber Bicecci

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of multiple current lines of discussion that dialogue with the “artifact” Conjunto vacío (2015), by the Mexican Verónica Gerber Bicecci (1981). The mathematical logic mentioned by the title refers to the graphic representation of Venn diagrams that the etymology of “extravagance” -as “wandering beyond the limits”- corrodes through the approach to “literature outside itself” (Garramuño, 2015) and to “lives outside of limits” (Arfuch, 2018) because of political reasons. Having defined herself as “a visual artist who writes” and being the daughter of exiles who had to leave Argentina, Gerber gathers these “universes” in her life experience and deploys them in a production articulated by the fact of wandering.

Conjunto vacío is the intermedial (Schmitter, 2019) place where both, words and images (many of which, but not all, are sets), are brought together through different strategies to speak about the collateral and inherited effects of exile. With this objective, I propose that Gerber recovers a category that appeared early in her reflections. In her Master's Thesis (2005), the Mexican had developed her conception of "negative space" from a personal interpretation of Venn that also receives the Duchampian inspiration of the infrathin. The "negative space" that occurs in the line (itself) performs in Conjunto vacío as an interval that activates senses that search for their own language (verbal and/or visual, complementary and/or deviated from each other) in order to understand and capture the incomprehensible.

Gerber set up a kind of glossary in which neither emptiness, nor negativity, nor the limit are synonyms of cancellation; rather: the empty set has no elements but exists, the negative space does not erase but connects and the limit is the certainty of a beyond.