MUTISIANA
Self-published poem book
2022
Painting, drawing, engraving
MUTISIANA is a self-managed graphic project in collaboration with the writer Andrés Caro.
I illustrated his poem Mutisiana, dividing the stanzas into pages and accompanying them with multiple illustrations. The illustrations were painted in china ink and watercolor, then transferred to engraving plates for hand printing. A limited series of 10 books was published. The book had an honorary mention in the ArtBook Biennale in Udine, Italy, in 2023.
The poem is inspired by the figure of José Celestino Mutis, a Spanish scholar in charge of the Royal Botanical Expedition in the Nuevo Reino de Granada between 1783 and 1816.
The shape of the accordion book evokes the river, a space for exploration and displacement, the center of the activities of 19th-century naturalists, and a metaphorical space for flow.
The illustrations were conceived with a watery and evocative aesthetic, and try to respond to the cadence of the writing as well as the images that the poem builds: slow, ethereal, tropical, and somewhat moldy.
© Lisa Anzellini. All rights reserved.
