Elisabeth Workman’s a city_a cloud [pdf file, 576 Kb], *a dusi/e-chap 2006, is a mixed-media collaborative numeric sequence of short poems alongside images which attempt to map, trace and define what is initially secreted, unexpressed, or lays dormant and undefined within the framework of a city.
The texts are not simply a narration of the visual images, nor vice-versa. The whole structure of visual items and sentences shows that the two forms cross the same constructed territory and thus create a unique as well as unified codework — a disposition which deconstructs, redefines and elaborates sharp declarations, formulating brilliant memory spots in way of choice, time, space, displacement, and permutation. The images, by Barbara Campbell, provide a visual texture to the fragments’ journey. The texts and images both work alone and together concurrently, as a whole structure of visual items and text which illustrate the same grainy terrain. The collaborative element of which effectively works in its similar crossings, only to be then elucidated, expanded and then, again, deconstructed.
In this way, the texts and frames of broken narrative elements are, not-so surprisingly, fitting: “she was working / against the idea of a coherent / whole, it was the liquid room / and the new buildings that / already resembled ruins” (Fragm.15) drawing a “fluorescent world / filled with flickering bodies” (6), flickering lines.

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marco giovenale, susana gardner

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Elisabeth Workman, a city_a cloud [pdf file, 576 Kb]. Dusi/e-chap project, http://dusie.org, 2006. Images: Barbara Campbell. Art & design layout master: Erik Brandt.