Augusto de Campos (b. 1931, São Paulo, Brazil) is a writer, translator, music critic and visual artist. With his brother Haroldo de Campos, he founded the concrete poetry movement in Brazil. Written in 1953, his series of color­ poems, POETAMENOS (Minuspoet) are considered the first consistent examples of concrete poetry in Brazil. His practice initially focused on visual poetry, where verse and conventional syntax are abandoned and words are rearranged in graphic patterns and colours; and has since expanded to experimentation with new media. His poems have been presented in numerous international exhibitions and anthologies.

Cidadecitycité, 2021
With Cidadecitycité, a poem becomes a city and a city becomes a poem. The work, composed in Brazilian Portuguese, presents a dense dialogue between language, the potential representation of what constitutes a city, as well as a concrete poem. The text consists of a collection of cut and composited words (all of them originally ending with ‘cidade’) and placed in alphabetic order. It features the repetition of the occurrence of the word ‘cidade’ (‘city’ in Portuguese), and the repetition of this same word translated to English (‘city’) and to French (‘cité’). As the formant fragments of words were chosen only among those who had the same spelling in the three languages the whole results in a trilingual poem, which can be read in any of the languages (from “atrocidade” to “voracidade”, from “atrocity” to “voracity”, “atrocité” to “voracité”) and his long hundred letter line word suggests an iconic relation with a big town., Cidadecitycité is a historical concrete poem from 1963. In concrete poetry, the graphic composition is as important as the meaning of the words, their sound and performance. The poem is presented in the Music Pavilion in the small park close to Moss Kunstforening (Art Association). Within the context of HOUSE OF COMMONS, experiencing the complexity of what is a city can also perhaps be extended to include the many layers that constitute Cidadecitycité.

M11 Kirkeparken 4

Photo: Eivind Lauritzen/GalleriF15