Monday, October 22, 2018

Zoria April - DISTILLED EMOTION: NEUROMANCER'S TOKYO



Zoria April (Zorica Petkoska Kalajdjieva) has been writing and being published since she was 7 years old. She is a master public reading evader, she writes in short forms, currently lacking the discipline for a novel. She is writing in 3 languages, reading in 10. She translates between some of those, sometimes professionally, sometimes just to break beauty down to its smallest parts and recreate it. She has published 2 poetry collections of her own, Stars and Sparks of a Dream 2000 and Wordigami 2015, and has been published in various group collections and magazines in several countries and languages, most recently in Japan and Hong Kong.
She holds an MA in English literature and is just completed a research fellowship in Japanese culture and concrete/visual poetry. She is currently a travel writer for several magazines and websites.




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DISTILLED EMOTION: NEUROMANCER'S TOKYO
-        the idea behind the series –

The punctuation in a text is its emotional markings, music notes, the scores for breathing.

Loving a city means communicating not only with its present, but also with its past and all its imagined futures. We enter a dialogue with the art created for that city and all the stories overlap with our daily reality like a big and complex origami. Living in Tokyo for me means constantly meeting new aspects of the city while at the same time seeing the aspects I've read about. The hardest aspect to find is the futuristic cyber-punk Tokyo, but I do get glimpses of it occasionally. So here I am, always searching for the Tokyo as described in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Through the dialogue with this enormous megalopolis I have learned to look for details, symbolical dots I could then connect so that the image reveals itself. That is the only way to walk through and soak up the enormous urban space and an endless mix of worlds and realities.

That is how I decided to go back in Neuromancer and distill the emotion from it. All the questions and dilemmas, all excitements, all silences, every breath inhaled, all of it is coded in the punctuation of the text. In these posters of visual poetry, the punctuation is our minimalist map for breathing and thinking. GPS coordinates through the cyber-punk imagined city. The punctuation is a guiding star. The punctuation is the conductor of the word-orchestra. In this series with only punctuation, words are present with their absence.




1.(B)RAIN

When it rains in Tokyo, I come closest to the cyberpunk fictional metropolis.
When it rains in Tokyo, only the number of umbrellas grow. The city is not giving up, buzzing as normal. 

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2. INVISIBLE STORIES

all full stops from the novel

Every full stop and every person is their own story. We must accept that we will never read all the books. We must accept that the city keeps on living regardless who lives in it and with it.