VGB: Somehow I realized they went together when I started writing seriously. GB: Have you always written and drawn together? Verónica Gerber Bicecci (VGB): Well, that’s what I studied: visual arts, and that’s why visual arts go first. Geoff Bendeck (GB): You call yourself a visual artist who also writes. I sat down with Verónica in a breezy café just below her art studio and writing space at the edge of Mexico City’s Parque las Americas to talk about Empty Set, artists who write, writers who draw, and much, much more.
In Empty Set, Verónica Gerber Bicecci has found a seemingly new and fascinating way to tell and show us a vital story of modern loneliness, exile, and imagination. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Empty Set, inspired and influenced by writers who also drew and artists who also wrote, finds the meridian points of life in the space where words fail to convey the whole spectrum of emotion. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes, “Seeing comes before words. Days later, in a different Mexican city, I finally found it. I spent a day navigating the bookstores of that same city in search of Conjunto Vacío.
Several years ago, I heard rumblings from a friend connected to the Mexican literary world about a different book, one that had managed to combine a quiet, poetic elegance with drawings and sketches to tell the tale of a young woman navigating the singular worlds of Mexico City, love, and memory. It feels rare these days to encounter books so fundamentally different, fundamentally unique from those encountered across a lifetime of reading. Geoff Bendeck speaks with Verónica Gerber Bicecci about her novel Empty Set, translated by Christina MacSweeney and out this month with Coffee House Press.
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