Form, Object, Art

Caroline Tracey probes the experimental book-art of Mexican author Verónica Gerber Bicecci.

By Caroline TraceyMay 27, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Environment

I’LL NEVER FORGET the day Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s The Company came to live at my house. It arrived unexpectedly, in a bubble mailer, with a New York return address, left on the concrete doorstep. I slid it out from the sheath: a 7.5 x 5.75 rectangle, slightly less than an inch thick, of fibrous brown-gray paper. Embossed on the front was a network of squiggly lines, dots, and nodes, along with deep black letters spelling its name: the company.

I lifted the cover and turned the pages. Passing several empty rectangles of black abyss, I arrived at a lowercase “a.” I turned again and found a photo: a road sign partially covered by spiky bushes, reading “Nuevo Mercurio 90.”

The images were saturated and challenging to decipher, as though run through a Xerox machine too many times. Where I felt I could make out a stone outcrop and a hole in the landscape, it could also simply have been a change in the color of the rocks, or a mass of vegetation. “You’ll never forget the day The Company came to live with you after your husband brought It home from a trip,” the next page read. Then the subsequent page: “You’ll have lived through nearly three years of predictions coming to pass; you’ll have two children and won’t be happy.” 

The text outlined the coming of a mysterious presence that terrorized the women of the household but ingratiated itself to the patriarch, and that eventually left the house and its surrounding town abandoned. The images behind it suggested a story of mining, whose complete plunder left nothing of the town behind. Slowly, the story text revealed itself as a critique of the environmental and social impacts of the Nuevo Mercurio mine in Zacatecas, Mexico.

Yet, even deciphered, The Company (tr. Christina MacSweeney, 2025; originally published in Spanish in 2019) didn’t feel like an ordinary book. Its physicality sets it apart: everything from the cover’s folded corners to the delicious smell of ink oozing from the black pages contributes to its aura. This sense of self-possession marks the work of Gerber Bicecci, who describes herself as an “artist who writes.”

Gerber Bicecci was born in Mexico City in 1981, the daughter of two professors of psychoanalysis who left Argentina amid the country’s decline into military dictatorship. Studying at La Esmeralda, the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking in the nation’s capital, she found herself in a borderland: she thought so much in words that her peers didn’t see her as one of them, but she also wasn’t drawn to text alone. Her career has instead spanned disciplines, including ephemera, installations, and gallery shows, with books as anchors that gather her ideas and ground them in a fixed object.

Her first book, Mudanza (“Moving Out”), which was originally published in 2010, collects seven essays about efforts to narrow the space between reality and its representation in writing and art. Many of the book’s subjects—Vito Acconci, Ulises Carrión, Sophie Calle, Marcel Broodthaers—are writers who, at certain moments in their lives, declared that they had renounced writing in order to search for a way to surpass the medium’s limitations.

The collection’s opening essay, “Ambliopía” (“Amblyopia”), provides a first key to understanding The Company. Amblyopia is the condition commonly referred to as “lazy eye,” in which one eye is stronger than the other. Over time, the brain comes to rely on the strong eye alone. This leaves the other to wander, its sightings unprocessed. Gerber Bicecci writes that many amblyopes—herself among them—experience their weaker eye’s sight as though “looking through the waviness that hot air produces, where the images focus and dissipate constantly: desert mirages that disappear when we get closer.” (These translations are my own; Mudanza has not yet been published in English.) Yet she wonders what she might have encountered had she “been able to follow that errant trespasser to the limits of the unknown.”

To her, the subjects of Mudanza’s chapters are amblyopic: they oscillate between ideas and reality, and the various media through which humans attempt to represent each. At the same time, the book creates an amblyopic structure. One eye moves forward through an intellectual genealogy, holding a fixed horizon line, while the other goes wherever it needs to go to gather the material for each essay, creating a form like this:

The Company follows this structure. Part “a.” consists of a single, linear tale told in text boxes layered on top of images. It is a rewriting of “El huésped” (“The Houseguest”), a 1959 short story by Mexican author Amparo Dávila. Dávila was born in 1928 in Zacatecas, a state in central Mexico best known for its silver mines. Her stories’ eerie atmospheres—often rendered through women’s alienation from the world—estrange the reader in a way that borders on horror.

Gerber Bicecci’s version of the brief story makes only a few changes. It shifts from past into future tense; it mutates the word “guest” into the synonym “company.” And with the backdrop of images of an abandoned mine, The Company strikes a haunting tone different from the one in Dávila’s original tale.

Meanwhile, the book’s longer part, “b.,” is composed of fragments from a diverse range of texts: conversations with professors at the University of Zacatecas and mine caretakers, environmental science dissertations, newspaper articles about remediation, diagrams of the infrastructure of extraction. It’s a bibliography that, through Gerber Bicecci’s cutting and splicing, becomes an essay in its own right—an amblyopic journey that makes explicit the atmosphere of part a.

Gerber Bicecci’s second book, an autofictional novel called Conjunto vacío (Empty Set), was published in Mexico in 2015 and translated into English by Christina MacSweeney in 2018. Its protagonist, Verónica—an artist and the daughter of Argentine exiles in Mexico City—is trying to make sense of the beginnings and ends of her romantic relationships, as well as the rupture that exile produced in her family. The novel is populated by diagrams that describe the relationships between the characters, as well as graphics that map Verónica’s relationship to the universe around her. She becomes obsessed with dendrochronology, or the study of tree rings, as a way of tracing history in shapes, as well as with a system of punctuation astronomers use to translate the night sky.

Empty Set’s diagrams aren’t mere illustrations; they are crucial to drawing connections through the narrative. In one scene, for instance, Gerber Bicecci draws Verónica and her love interest Alonso kissing for the first time. In a step-by-step series, two circles transform into a gradually more and more complex Venn diagram. Eventually, they coalesce into a single, completely saturated circle with the caption “time doesn’t exist.”

Pages earlier, she had drawn the mind of Verónica’s grandmother—who never left Argentina—to illustrate how, for her, “today is thirty years ago. And it’s also today. All at the same time.” Comparing the two, it seems that the earlier diagram doubles time instead of erasing it: two once-overlapping circles of a Venn Diagram pull apart, looking like the rings of a growing tree. Verónica’s realizations about the function of time are at the heart of the novel’s plot, and the reader can only understand them by reading the diagrams along with the text.

These schematics echo the ideas of Mexican artist Ulises Carrión, who is the protagonist of a chapter of Mudanza. Carrión was born in the state of Veracruz in 1941, and during the 1960s seemed fast-tracked for the canon of Mexican writers. But he tired of Mexico City’s cultural hierarchies, moved to Amsterdam, and renounced traditional literature, opening a storefront archive dedicated to, as a promotional postcard put it,

other books
non books
anti books
pseudo books
quasi books

concrete books
conceptual books
structural books
project books
plain books

Concurrently, he began to devise a theory of “bookwork.” It called on writers and artists to think with the entire form of the book, not merely to write words. In his 1975 manifesto “The New Art of Making Books,” Carrión argued that, in the past, writers had written not books but texts. “A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words,” he wrote; “the book is an autonomous space-time sequence.”

In the new art of bookmaking, those who created books would use their material components, the space of their pages, and the squiggles and marks that filled them as equally important elements. In doing so, they would push their readers to engage with each book in its physical singularity. To read, argues Carrión, “one must apprehend the book as a structure, identifying its elements and understanding their function”—just as readers of Empty Set must adjust their pace to interpret Gerber Bicecci’s diagrams.

Though they employ concepts from bookworking, however, Mudanza and Empty Set still follow the shape of a text, not quite daring to become fully Carriónesque. Gerber Bicecci explains this at Mudanza’s close: though she could have taken each of its ideas to “the border that separates the world from its inverse,” she writes, it would have made the book completely unreadable: “And that is the paradox that eternally haunts me.”

The Company begins to defy these linear narratives. Though the book can be read front to back, it seems also to ask to be read up and down, suggesting out-of-order routes that cross-stitch the a. and b. sections. This spatial dynamism is an echo of its original form: the book was first a wall novel presented at the 2018 Bienal FEMSA, an art festival that takes place in a different Mexican city each year. That year, it was held in Zacatecas, prompting The Company’s setting in Nuevo Mercurio.

I saw the installation in February 2021 at Mexico City’s Proyectos Monclova. Each of the pages of part a. of the book was mounted individually on the wall so that, to follow the narrative, you had to move through the room. The wall behind the images was painted charcoal gray, with one of the schematic diagrams of the Nuevo Mercurio mine from part b. painted in white. The rendering gave viewers a sense of being underground, as though in a mine. At the same time, the installation sutured the components of the narrative together, offering different pathways through it.

The object that came to my house, then, is a hybrid between a bookwork and a wall novel: as much as it meditates on the container of the book, the pages also feel as though they could fly out of their binding at any moment, ready to reassemble themselves across the expanse of a room.

Unlike Mudanza and Empty Set, The Company is not a meditation on writing, time, or the interplay between them. It is a meditation on mining and the damages of extraction, rendered through physical form, temporality, words, and images. In part, this environmental turn makes sense as an extension of Gerber Bicecci’s search for ways to use language that carry material weight. It’s a jump from the page into the world, where everything is tangible and alive.

This shift is a change of topic but also of genre. In 2021, Gerber Bicecci edited a book titled En una orilla brumosa: Cinco rutas para repensar los futuros de las artes visuales y la literatura (“On a Misty Bank: Five Routes for Rethinking the Futures of the Visual Arts and Literature”), which included texts by a wide range of authors, from Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem to the Redes Comunales Mixes, a post-authorial Indigenous collective that signs their chapter, “August, 2172.” Gerber Bicecci united these seemingly incompatible subjects through the lens of the speculative essay. In her prologue, she writes that “to essay speculatively is to believe that you can make worlds by paying attention to the one that surrounds us.”

The Company, too, is a speculative essay. It makes its world by mixing a haunting, rewritten story, over-reproduced photographs that leave their details to viewers’ imaginations, and fragments of research whose significance resides in their interstices and juxtapositions. It offers itself as evidence that, in a moment of ecosystem collapse, aesthetic experimentation can yield new ways of understanding damage and articulating its remedies. In its very existence, it argues that the new art of the book of the future will be amblyopic, spatial, and speculative. The complexity of the world can’t be comprehended otherwise.

I’ll never forget the day The Company came to live at my house.