Visual Poetry (Joan Salvat-Papasseit, Joan Brossa & Chema Madoz)

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, calligrams (1) emerged, used by poets such as Apollinaire in France and Marinetti in Italy. These were a hybrid of text and image, where words were arranged to form lines and drawings with aesthetic minimalism.

These optical illusions, known as Visual Poetry, were used in different languages and countries. Later, other forms of visual communication, such as object construction or photography, were also employed to create visual poems.

Joan Salvat-Papasseit (2), for example, wrote the poem Les formigues [The Ants] interwoven with drawings. Joan Brossa (3) created visual poems using objects. In photography, Chema Madoz (4) crafted visual fictions full of irony. Anna Zeligowski (5) used a calligram, in both English and Hebrew, to represent a 15th-century Japanese poem by Ikkyū Sōjun.