Augusto De Campos
b. 1931, São Paolo, Brazil
Linguaviagem, 1967
White card stock printed with blue, green and black text, 250 x 255 mm folded. Printed in an edition of 100 in conjunction with the Brighton Concrete Poetry Festival, 1967.
Linguaviagem: cubepoem by the Brazilian Concrete Poet and founding member of the Noigandres movement, Augusto de Campos. Unfolds to cube shape with three letters screen printed on each side – the outer sides in blue, the inner sides in green. The three letter groupings are LIN / GUA / VIA / GEM. The letter groups combine (as is printed on one page) to make: “LINGUA: tongue / VIA: via / LINGUAGEM: Language / VIAGEM: voyage”. One of De Campos’ most successful and famous poems. A beautiful poetry object/sculpture. Very rare. See Form magazine no.4 (Bann & Steadman) for advert for this item and full listings for the 1967 festival.
Caixa Preta, 1975
Augusto de Campos, Julio Plaza and Caetano Veloso, Edições Invenção, São Paulo, 1975. Edition of 1000. Black and red print on white stock, folded portfolio, 305 x 237 mm.
This is one of Augusto de Campos' most ambitious works, realised in collaboration with Julio Plaza. Like Poemobiles (a collaboration between de Campos and Plaza from 1974), Caixa Preta invites the reader actively to handle the object-poems. Caixa Preta is effectively an exhibition within a portfolio, the mixed media contents of which hold numerous sculptural possibilities. And indeed, large-scale versions of ‘VIVA VAIA’ and ‘Cubogramas Montaveis’ – originally featured in Caixa Preta – appeared in the Poesia concreta: o projeto verbivocovisual exhibition in 2008. This work was also exhibited together with a record player at A Token of Concrete Affection at the Brazilian Embassy, London, in 2015. This work is much sought-after: despite being an edition of 1000, it is very hard to find.
