Empty Set: Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Christina MacSweeney
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, California
Mexican visual artist who writes, Verónica Gerber Bicecci discusses her novel Empty Set, with critically acclaimed translator Christina MacSweeney, who brought it into English. Silvia Oviedo López will moderate the conversation.
A Venn diagram for love, Empty Set traces and reconstructs relationships using geometry, ice cores, and tree rings. It tells a story of holes appearing inside other holes. It is the chronicle of a breakup that results in a journey toward family origins. The narrator, the daughter of Argentine exiles who settled in Mexico City, must move back into the apartment from which her mother suddenly disappeared. When words fail, fall short, or stop working altogether, they yield to drawings and abstractions. Empty Set traces a language of its own, composed of letters, diagrams, and hollowed spaces.
This event is supported in part by grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has published several books, including Conjunto vacío, which was awarded the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature Prize. She also curated a selection of artworks from La Caixa Collection, exhibited in Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2020. She presently teaches in Mexico City on the SOMA art program, a space dedicated to cultural and artistic exchange.
Christina MacSweeney’s work has been recognized in a number of important awards, and her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth was awarded the Valle Inclán Translation Prize and also shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent translations include works by Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez.
Silvia Oviedo-López is a Spanish poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in different anthologies and journals on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the founder of Desbandada, a journal of original and translated poetry.