In 2018-19, János Áfra, a Hungarian poet and I have came up with a fresh take on how we can collaborate while continents and timezones apart. This book recorded interactions between an artist and a poet over a year and a half long journey. We moved in and out of our comfort zones to be able to respond to each other without adhering to the limitations of the medium, language, or geographic locations. Our distance was not only geographical but disciplinary. The system of art we navigate in our immediate fields of art and poetry require a unique set of frameworks and language to which we invited one another.  –  Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi
www.productivemisreadings.org

Description:
The poet and the artist address and challenge one another in different languages, through their experimental dialogue they create a third, and arrive together to a common tongue. Through their continent-spanning interactions, editing programmes become their platform, providing space for intermedial crossings, the varying and mixing of divergent codes, the overriding of rules and the blurring of boundaries, through which a concentrated mode of expression is invented. The result is neither art book nor poetry book, the pictures are not illustrations, the poems are not captions, the translation is not a mere exchanging of languages. Productive Misreadings is an equilibrium, whose every new page is an impression left by the spontaneous and dynamic collaboration between two authors, accommodating one another yet keeping their own autonomy. They revive and revitalize questions harking back millennia (ut pictura poesis, the paragone) while wilfully evading hierarchical categorization within any one branch of the arts. The creators call attention to problems stemming from specialized forms of knowledge and isolated modes of expression, as well as the necessity for conscious risk-taking, progressive ventures and experiments in closing the gap.
The book was Alföld Foundation and Méliusz Juhász Péter Library and was funded by The Ministry of Human Capacities.