blanca bercial

Pending Status / WIP
Ink on paper

This calendar marks the days I have been working on my artist visa application. From March 1, 2021 to (unknown).

I find myself in an impasse of action, standing by at life, while days pass blank and unperceibed. I keep postponing art projects, jobs, enjoying friends’ company, and I am unable to continue writing my stories. Will I have to interrupt them? Instead, I have suspended myself. Repressed, I keep writing down ideas on a list with the hope that I will make them happen one day, when days will be on the record again. Time keeps passing, off the record and almost unnoticed for me.

I will have this calendar at least.

The Creek / 2021
El arroyo
Typewriter on paper, water

This is a short story I wrote last year about a creek in my grandma’s village. The story narrates my time spent in the village as a kid and how I grew up thinking that the word ‘creek’ was meant to name a dried road that crossed the village under the sea level and with bridges on top. Of course I grew up and found out what a creek is, and how climate change dried the rivers and the creek no longer crossed my grandma’s village.

I wrote the story on paper and then submerged it in water. The water gradually washed away the letters, just as the water slowly drained away from the creek in my grandmother's village.

Care / 2020 Handle with Care Series Barbed wire
8.5 in x 23.5 in

Self Care, Health Care, Dental Care, Skin Care, Life Care, Don’t Care, Care Taker, Care Plan, Personal Care, Hair Care, Primary Care, Child Care, Palliative Care, Critical Care, Take Care, Give Care…

Living in San Francisco, I have heard the word ‘care’ countless times, to the extent that I started questioning if this word has lost its meaning due to the extreme use that is made of it. ‘Care’ has become a ready-made word. Yet ‘care,’ like barbed wire, hurts if we are close enough to handle it.

Bestiario / 2020
Typewriter on mylar
From Poetry as a Critical Form

How can poetry be translated from one language to another without losing its essence? For this project I have translated Julio Cortazar's first short stories book Bestiario, words filled with metaphors that transcend the ordinary to deeper existential and sociopolitical questions. (((Bestiario))) consists of 8 short stories narrating monstruos appearances in the daily life of different people. The monsters and the stories in the book are metaphors for the quotidian of the everyday and from the writer's personal and historical context. Their complexity can only be translated with simple acts, and in an effort to translate the untranslatable, I have translated the eight stories to symbol-based poems. Each pair of symbol-based texts signify one story contained in Cortazar’s book. Through this self-made language, I seek to illustrate the essence of each story in the simplest way possible, and question the use we make of languages, how we shape them, how they shape us in return, and ultimately, how we make sense of them.

Sound Poems Series

Concrete Poems Series

Air Poems Series