The role of images (and texts) in the cross-cultural project of Quebec magazine Vice Versa

Abstract

The Quebec magazine Vice Versa (1983-1996), founded by, among others, Fulvio Caccia, writer and theorist of literary translingualism and accurate observer of the Franco-Canadian intercultural melting pot, and his brother Gianni, the magazine’s artistic director, devoted particular attention to the graphic dimension and to the potential of the photographic medium. Photography is acknowledged as an artistic medium in its own right – see issue no. 43 (1993), which is largely devoted to a “photo special” – but the editors also use photography as a dialogical form between images and theoretical, militant and fictional texts; at the same time they refuse to consider photographs as a form of illustration of the written word. The magazine’s desire to systematically situate itself as close as possible to reality, to debates (translinguistic, but also transartistic and societal) is thus amplified by the use of photography, seen as “a way of appropriating portions of reality, and in some cases even intervening in reality” (Denis Martineau). More often than not, as Gilbert Duclos, who became one of the magazine’s main photographers, explicitly acknowledges, the relationship between images and text must be inferred by the reader, as the magazine remains faithful to its “Babelian” editorial line, centered on the desire for a non-hierarchical juxtaposition of languages, debates and artistic media in the service of a mosaic and collective construction of culture in migrant context.