Urban Virgins Web Exclusive

We’ve juiced up the web version of one of the features from our Fall 2007 issue, and we’ve just got to brag about it.

“Urban Virgins” shows a series of paintings by Ana de Orbegoso paired with poems by Odi Gonzales. De Orbegoso has created 5’ tall wearable Spanish paintings of saints and virgins that have been mashed up with photographs of contemporary Peruvian women. Then she has people walk around Cusco, Peru in these costumes, bringing art to the streets.

Cusco poet Odi Gonzales has written a poem in response to each of these paintings, attempting to tell the story of each saint and virgin. True to the purpose of de Orbegoso’s art, Gonzales wrote the poems in Quechua, also translating them into Spanish and English.

In the magazine, each poem is printed in English, paired with its image. But online, we’re able to present them in Spanish and Quechua. Better still, we provide audio of Gonzales reading each poem in all three languages, allowing listeners to appreciate them in their original agglutinative, tri-vowelled, plosive-sprinkled language. This sort of enhancement of a printed work is perhaps a small touch, but hopefully it’s the sort of thing that will make poetry – and Quechua – more accessible.