La Cambre - WHEN WORDS BECOME FORM. Écritures plastiques

For the past five years, the Art(s) & écriture(s) transdisciplinary module for students pursuing a Master’s degree at ENSAV La Cambre has examined the wide array of contemporary forms of writing in art. The debates and exchanges between the word and the image are nothing new. From time immemorial, artworks have always incorporated words into their production, and writing has always been an integral component of the artwork. This represents one of the most fertile dialectical tensions in human thought, one that runs across the history of art and of ideas.

Contemporary interactions between art and literature manifest themselves specifically in what critics have lately labelled “literature outside the book”, “exhibition literature” or “visual literature”, whereby writing artists/writers appropriate language in all its forms via a wide variety of mediums. Today, the forms of writing are specifically being revived in the realm of visual arts, shifting away from the classical forms of literature associated with the medium of the book, such as the novel, poetry and the essay.