The planet is a parchment: the environmental poetics of Sérgio Medeiros

Abstract

The work of Sérgio Medeiros (Bela Vista, 1959) stands as an exemplary case of hybridity or even indiscernibility between artistic genres today, perhaps not only within the Brazilian context. Since his early books, Medeiros has pursued constant experimentation between prose and poetry, which soon expands to theatre, calligraphy, artist’s books, drawing, and painting; simultaneously embodying visual poetry, or, as he calls it, “calligraphy sculptures”, “glyphs”, and, at times, music, performance, and installation. His production leads us to experience a rhythm that transcends its media, occupying space, its surroundings, and moving towards an “environmental poetics”, in the sense of the environmental programme of the artist Hélio Oiticica. The aim of this article is, by presenting Medeiros’ calligraphic and “glyphic” project, to demonstrate how this hybrid and expanded work is connected to the creation of other possible cosmogonies. The analyses and reflections stem from the perspective of his creative process and are primarily based on the author’s own thinking, which, along with his visual and verbal poems, constitutes his poetic cosmogony. Furthermore, it is important to observe how the environmental unfolding is the gesture consistent with cosmogonies that emerge from an ethical act of listening and approaching other ways of seeing and writing the world, proposing that “the planet is a parchment”, upon which everything and everyone writes.