Texts that do things The experience of reading through art

There is a type of art that incorporates writing and textuality as an experiential proposition. An art that uses words as artistic devices and visuality as a semantic activator. A circular journey between image and word often taken by artists. Some choose to explore aphorisms, like Esther Ferrer with her hard-hitting and laconic Silla Zaj (Zaj Chair, 1974). Others celebrate the liberating power of words, like Asier Mendizábal in Cinema (1999), where he reproduces the militant messages introduced into factories as a tool by filmmakers; or like Mireia Sallarès in Literatura de replà, una relectura (Literature on the landing, a rereading, 2014), when she stuck literary texts onto the bricked-up doorways of some flats in the building where she lived, preventing them being occupied by squatters. Other artists choose to give cinematic presence to the inevitable subjectivity of any act of communication, such as Pierre Bismuth in Postscript/The Passenger (OV) (1996–2010), or to perform theoretical sentences like Valie Export in Cutting (1967–68), while reminding us that, as Marshall McLuhan said: ‘The content of writing is speech.’ These are texts that do things and experience reading through art.