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Drawing on the exhibition In the Eye of Bambi, which uses seven artworks to tell a story of ecological and linguistic collapse resulting in both the end of humanity and the beginning of new life forms, the Mexican author Veronica Gerber Bicecci is in conversation with translator Christina MacSweeney and specialist in science fiction literature and ‘ecocatastrophe’ Dr Caroline Edwards (Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London) on the occasion of this final display in the ‘La Caixa’ Collection series.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. She is the author of Mudanza (Mexico City: Ed. Auieo–Taller Ditoria, 2010), Empty Set (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018, translated by Christina MacSweeney), which won the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature prize and Otra Mirada Cálamo prize and Migrant Words (Guadalajara: Impronta Casa Editora, 2019, translated by Christina MacSweeney). Her most recent projects in other media are: vocabulary b (2019) in muca Roma, Mexico City and The Dystopian Machine (2018) in the Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, Zacatecas. She was an editor at the Mexican publishing cooperative Tumbona Ediciones (2010–2017)
Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth and her translations of other works by Latin American and Spanish authors, including Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Empty Set, have received critical acclaim. She has also contributed to a number of anthologies of Latin American writing.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopianism, science fiction, the philosophy of time, and theories of Marxist revolutionary subjectivity. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a second monograph, provisionally titled Arcadian Revenge: Utopia, Apocalypse and Science Fiction in the Era of Ecocatastrophe. The book examines the relationship between climate change and the science fictional representation of extreme environments, including Mars, Antarctica, the deep sea, and the centre of the Earth.
