Absences, both as a verbal phenomenon and textual/visual strategy, are evocative. They can convey even more than what is included in a work—pointing to the unsaid, the unexpressed, redacted, or censored. A space, an error, or an errant form can be seen as a collision between semiotic systems, lending itself to ekphrastic consideration, braiding together the verbal and the visual. History until this day is punctuated with gendered absences, and the visual mode has the potential to underscore them by making them visible; as noted by Elisabeth Frost (2016), there are “specifically feminist possibilities of a visually-oriented poetics” (339). Glitch feminism, for example, builds itself on the notion of the ‘glitch-as-error,‘ a term seeping from the digital world to claim and embrace the fluidity of the material against the dominance and normativity of the binary (Russell 2020). This call finds itself at an intersection between visual poetics as an approach/ philosophy and visual poetry as one of its genre outputs, engaging with both the visual and verbal to explore gender and absence.

Visual poetics are defined through a number of perspectives: as an approach described by Mieke Bal (1988), it denies the “word-image” opposition and explores possibilities of a poetics of the visual and the visual dimensions of the written word, calling for mutual collaboration between and across mediums (178), while Frost (2016) defines it “as writing that explores the materiality of word, page, or screen” (339). Within the genre output of visual poetry—a genre umbrella that may include concrete poetry, asemic (“wordless”) poems, choreopoems, erasures, and redactions—there are countless examples of artists working on “visual compositions precisely to question the gendered politics of the history of poetry, material culture, and reading or performance” (Frost 2016, 339).

Within the context of this call, we are specifically interested in the potential of visual poetics to render visibility to absences, engage with error, and convey histories of silence, censorship and erasure. What happens when certain narratives lack visibility, and present blank spaces within public visual language? Works by 21st century women poets Anne Carson and Gabrielle Civil demonstrate a poetic engagement with absence, as well as the material and visual aspects of both language and translation. In a note following “errances: an essay of errors after Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier,” performance artist, poet, and writer Gabrielle Civil (2020) describes her ongoing work of translating A vol d’ombre by Haitian poet Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier as “a trial of wandering,” “a shadow lineage” and “a timeline of discarded choices.” The essay´s visual dimensions—namely, white space, brackets, and cross-outs— constitute an archive of doubt, possibility, absence, and trials.

Absences and errors can convey meaning and possibilities for reading and interpretation—in Civil’s case, they indicate a grappling with the language itself, and the challenges translation presents with “false friends, language, meaning, and memory” (Civil 2020). In Carson’s case, the brackets and white space in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho perform and engage with the loss—an elegy for the missing pieces of the source text itself in its entirety, and an engagement with what remains.

This call is interested in how gender-based concerns can be expressed through visual language and its absences, resulting in visual poetics in their varied and multilayered manifestations—and how these intersections may illuminate the bounds and possibilities of genre, form, and semiotic system.

We invite explorations and examples of artistic productions which utilise the interplay between the verbal, visual, and gender—in particular, the use of visual poetics to highlight absence, invisibility and erasure, considering: