El otro tigre. My collage for Let's Make a Collage - A Contest for All Creatives on Hive - Round 61
When I began to examine the rose bushes closely, the bad memories began to come. My university, now destroyed and on fire, had a square with very similar rose bushes. Perhaps that is why the idea of reading found a place in this collage. Reading has always been a defense against evil that is too close. At that university, and many times contemplating those roses, I learned to read again. I assumed literature as part of my life.
Shaka's photograph for Round 61 of Let'sMake a Collage (see the bases here) is very beautiful, but above all it's an invitation. I decided to respond to that invitation with a poem that is very important to me: "El otro tigre", by Jorge Luis Borges.
I would also like to share these lines with the warm @agmoore, and not only because I know that at least once she researched about the Argentine author, but because, after having seen his collage, which is a tribute to imagination and literature through the references to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I feel that there is a singular affinity of interests, which I appreciate.
The poem "The Other Tiger" is a poem about the possibility (or impossibility?) of representing reality. If I could point to a beginning for my career as a researcher, perhaps it would be this one. It is also a fundamental question for any artist.
In my collage there are not only the words of Borges' poem, but there is Borges floating above his words, perched on an ink star.
Source
Below I put two little reader girls, because a reader is really always an alter ego, and the tiger of dreams that fiction represents, but if you look at the background, the door to the horizon is guarded by a ram, the animal that protects the Egyptians and creates the winds. I am not especially mystical, but today I want to believe that protective spirits exist.
I put a huge rose in the center, but it is not a rose: it is the image of a rose's photograph (never forget Magritte's lessons).
I wish you could read Borges' poem (here you can find it in Spanish and English, in Alastair Reid's translation).
About the process
Once the theme was decided, the first approach was to go around that structure. I cut it out and from there came the rönir that is about to land on this side of things.I enlarged the format of the photo, because I needed more space in the background. Then I replaced the sky with sheets of old paper, written with a typography that evokes old typewriters. The trees were stuffed in drops of water, to make them strange. After all, if you get close enough, everything can be very strange. I tried to maintain a certain order of the elements with tensions that form triangles and the distribution that respects the planes of @shaka's photography, but I broke the scale, so that the human and animal figures would help me to maintain the unreality, as if the rose park was a toy park.
I worked with Gimp.
Apart from this, I continue to marvel at the masks I learned in @quamtung's kind lessons.
Below is a list of the images I used:
Photo by @shaka
Readers
https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vfynt
https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/ni%C3%B1a-vintage-victoriana-de-fondo-1001973/
Rose
https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vqyul/es
Tiger
https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/tigre-acostada-arte-vintage-2240883/
Paper Bird
https://pxhere.com/es/photo/908320
Borges
https://snl.no/Jorge_Luis_Borges
Paper background
https://pixabay.com/es/photos/de-papel-la-textura-de-edad-5746244/
A man once told a story.
My grandmother picked up that story and kept it.
One day he gave it to me, but it was so old, it was moth-eaten.
I remember the holes of old age and ruin.
And yet, it was a story as beautiful as gold.
I have kept it for many years.
Who will I give my story to?
I give it to you.
Keep it and one day let it fly.
What a stunning collage my friend! I'm thrilled to watch this 😃
Wish you the very best!
Thank you very much. I am very happy with your enthusiasm. Welcome always!
My best wishes to you too!
Muy interesante lleno de mucha sabiduría excelente adncabrera
Gracias por venir a ver mi collage, @angeli-b. Me entusiasma tu apreciación y la agradezco. ¡Bienvenida siempre!
Gracias 😊
My dear @abncabrera,
Thank you for the very enjoyable moments I just spent reading "The Other Tiger". It has been years since I read a poem by Borges. This may be one of the best--or maybe my memory is fading? :) I have found the poem in Spanish and will read that tonight on my iPad before I sleep (no pressure or distractions then).
As for the similarities between us:
My one refuge in childhood.
As for Borges: In his entertainment of alternate truths/reality, I have always seen freedom. It is a stand against orthodoxy and rigidity. It is the possibility of a future, one not yet imagined. I think, for you in Venezuela today, such a writer is a necessity.
What a wonderful, outstanding collage. This elevates our LMAC contest to another level.
Very good luck with your extraordinary effort.
Warm regards, AG
Dear @agmoore, I learned to read very early and discovered reading late. Until the age of sixteen I was almost completely an inhabitant of the planet of orality. My grandmother told me about her life, mixing it with movies and books she had read in her youth. She was a kind of tropical Sherezade. And, although I became a reader late in life, I think my grandmother's stories had already made me a book addict. When I started reading literature, it was the most intense experience of love. At my university, I began to study literature and to specialize in Literary Theory, pushed by that love and such good teachers that never said "No" to me, always said "Prove it". Why am I telling you this? Perhaps for the same reason that my grandmother's story chose me from among her many grandchildren: I was paying attention.
That's also why your story of piss and hats is beautiful to me, because my grandmother taught me to see the details and to treasure them. There is a lot in the details, in the clues that are lost over time.
By the way, ox urine is traditionally used in the making of marbled paper, one of the most beautiful decorative papers there is.
A big hug, dear @agmoore and thank you very much for appreciating my little collage experiment.
Dear @abncabrera,
Thank you for letting me into the universe of your childhood, and for sharing the experience with you grandmother. I only had one living grandmother, and I was estranged from the other. But my mother would sit us down on the floor and tell us stories about her youth, so that I felt I knew her parents, and even the village in Sicily from which they had emigrated.
Reading came late to me. I was an atypical learner (I think I'm generally atypical 😄), but the skill and discovery came simultaneously. Once I had the ability to go beyond my physical world through books, I was hooked. I read anything I could get my hands on, from classroom texts to discarded comic books. There was no library.
My family moved to New York City when I was eleven, and then there was a library. It was my refuge in those transition years. I learned more from library books than I did from formal instruction.
I love this platform because it allows me to transcend borders as books allowed when I was a child. You and I live on different continents. The languages with which we are comfortable are different. And yet, we "know" each other.
Thank you for allowing me that privilege.
Warmest regards,
Your companion in reading and literature,
AG
Thank you, @agmoore, for your warm and beautiful words. The stories and the childhood, the literature, all those treasures that people can share here. And meet souls like yours. Today was a good day.
We will continue to meet!
An outstanding collage work. Thank you for enriching the LMAC by crafting and contributing this fine artwork. I also read your kind remarks with pleasure. I'm sorry to hear about your University.
Dear @shaka, your appreciation is very important to me. I will keep it, as Rubén Darío said, next to "a verse, a pearl, a feather and a flower". My university is a sample of my country: they burned its central library, its theater and destroyed its laboratories. I wish we could get over it, but it has to be said, violating the rules of good Hive vibes, I see it as difficult and too long. We continue to fight.
Maybe that's why I'm as grateful for the spaces as I am for what has been done at LMAC: the opportunity to create and learn is very valuable, beyond the hobby of blockchain. Creating and learning makes us strong and free. I thank you for that.
I can't even fathom what you and your people have to endure for a long time now. It is most kind of you to share these positive remarks about the LMAC despite these existentially difficult circumstances. Thank you!
Hay tantos elementos en este collage que me encantan. Me gusta muchísimo que colocaras un poema y hasta al mismo Borges, el hecho de que cortaras parte del fondo para colocar la capa de papel viejo me volvió loca, se ve demasiado estético y lindo así, también que recortaras los árboles de manera circular me gustó muchísimo, parece recorte de revista.
Todo el transfondo está genial, que nos hablaras de tu universidad, la relación con las flores y los libros y que de allí saltaras al poema es impresionante. Creo que lo que mas me gusta es como te apropiaste tanto de la fotografía original y la volviste totalmente tuya, no solo con una pieza estéticamente agradable sino que la relacionaste directamente con tus vivencias y referencias a profundidad, eso es maravilloso.
Espero ganes ese concurso, por los momentos te has ganado un espacio en la sección de curación Women Around the World - Mujeres del Mundo centrada en todo lo relacionado a la mujer y en apoyo a las autoras en Hive. Muchas gracias por compartir este precioso collage.
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Estimados amigos de @adiwatribe, he leído varias veces su comentario, y cada vez he experimentado una gran emoción. Puedo ver que han apreciado y valorado mi trabajo, pero me emociona especialmente el hecho de que ha sido visto realmente por alguien que sabe valorar y lo hace con calidez. He visto también su comentario en la revista Mujeres del mundo (que no conocía) y me he sentido agradecida, no solo por la crítica muy bien construida y la recomendación que me hacen ante los usuarios de Hive, sino por el impulso que su apreciación da a mi trabajo.
En adelante cuentan con una lectora. Gracias.