A Conversation: Raffaella della Olga and Esther Ferrer
2025

Published in
Raffaella della Olga: Typescripts
Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Massachusetts, 2025

Esther Ferrer: We have know each other for about ten years. I have a great interest in your books and textile pieces, and you seem to have interest in my work too. But this is the first time that we have found an occasion to talk about it. We have a few things in common: for example, a taste for humble materials and for numbers as a form of resistance to subjectivity.

Raffaella della Olga: I also feel this proximity. I am particularly fond of your series of drawings and floor pieces using prime numbers. Among the performances of yours I have had the opportunity to see, one is particularly dear to my heart, Mallarmé révisé (1968). You stand upright with a small granite block on your head. The block is marked with dots like a die and we hear voices quoting Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous verses: “Each thought issues a throw of the dice” and “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.” You bring Mallarmé into your domain of performance and find echoes of 1968.

EF: You told me once that Mallarmé was important to you; he also played a role in my own development. When I was still in my teens, Jorge Oteiza, a great Basque sculptor who I knew quite well, told me about Igitur (1925). In this unique poem, he used the word grimoire, a book of spells, a word that I did not understand, but it made me think of witches and magic. When I got home, I searched for the word in my father’s dictionary. Among the examples it gave was Igitur and Un coup de dés. That is how I first became interested in Mallarmé. And you, Raffaella, how did you first encounter Mallarmé?

RdO: I discovered “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance,” 1897) through Marcel Broodthaers. He turned it into an “image” by covering the text with black bars, making the book completely abstract. From that point on, I began researching and reading to better understand the history of “Un coup de dés.” That led me to create my own version, in which I applied a mixture of phosphorescent powder and glue to each letter of the poem, making it legible only in the dark—provided it had been charged with a flashlight. The words formed a kind of constellation, an image the author himself had envisioned. That experience marked a shift in my work: the unique book became my primary medium. But it was a slow process. I made my first typescript in 2016.

EF: Through the distortion of your typewriter characters, you invent your own language—your own typography. How did you decide to start modifying them?

RdO: In my early works with the typewriter, I adopted the restricted, cryptic language of financial rating agencies: four letters, three numbers, and the + and – signs. It was during the subprime crisis, and I wanted to appropriate this abstract language, accessible to only a few. Aladdin (2012, see p. XX)—named after the asset management system—is a tablecloth on which I typed one of these poems. Through visual poetry I was inviting visitors to exchange ideas about a current issue.At that point, the typewriter confronted me with the obligation to create using only the line and the grid. When I felt I had exhausted the finance theme, I wanted to expand my possibilities. I started by filing down two keys: 8 and 6, which also hold the two different dashes (typewriters have two characters per key). That’s when I realized the potential of an abstract, asemic keyboard. It was a decisive moment. By giving up verbal and written expression, I was freeing myself from language, from logos, and from my own past. I invented a new space.

EF: To me, you’re not exactly freeing yourself from language—you’re inventing a language of your own. But you do free yourself from narrative. Maybe that’s why you give your books a number instead of a title. A number is abstract, while a title guides the reader.
How would you like your books to be read? Is there an ideal way?

RdO: That’s exactly it. I refuse to impose interpretation. The book is open—it’s up to each reader to find what they’re looking for, or better yet, what they weren’t. Still, I think certain things reveal themselves clearly to the reader-viewer. You move through the book slowly, notice textures, go back to better understand the transition from one page to the next, or let yourself be carried along by the sequence. For me, a book is a temporal sequence, and it takes me time to construct. And to really notice it, you have to turn the pages more than once.

EF: You remove material from the typewriter keys, but in your books you tend to build by accumulation. You achieve density by layering the characters you’ve invented. What does that accumulation mean to you?

RdO: It’s part of a personal obsession. Repeating, going back over the same page to build up signs, allows me to create a dense, often very tactile texture that eventually satisfies me. That’s why I sometimes speak of sculpture. This partial erasure of characters, this loss of definition, it’s to give form—a form I can’t imagine when I file the key, and one I can’t fully anticipate after either. Typing is like tapping with a small hammer on a flat surface, trying to reach an image I have in mind—for example an abstract stained-glass window I saw in a catalog. I like working within constraints, starting with the line—it’s a source of invention. I always find ways to improvise.

EF: When you look at those pages, you want to touch them—you want to enter into that mass of accumulated signs. It’s an accumulation without volume, purely visual. The mass isn’t there, and yet it is.

RdO: When I show my books, I interact with the public, and as I turn the pages, I sometimes notice disbelief from those discovering these colorful surfaces and their rhythms. The hand instinctively wants, as you say, to reach in and grasp the signs.

EF: In everything I’ve seen of your work, you remove material from the typewriter keys. Have you ever thought about adding something instead?

RdO: No, never. But I can use the typewriter without striking—like in T50 (2024, see p. XX) and some pages of T38 (2022, see p. XX). I hold the key with my left hand and then with my right I move the carriage or turn the roller to create friction. The machine’s usual noise, that hammering sound, disappears—you hear something much duller. My whole hand is involved.
The inspiration came from contemporary musical works in which the performer makes other parts of the instrument resonate. Some composers have borrowed gestures from the world of improvised music. Just as sliding a bow across the edge of a cymbal reveals new sounds, transforming my keyboard allows for previously unseen marks.

EF: There’s a lot of improvisation in your process of accumulation. Can that process be inspired by an image, a word you hear, or a story someone tells you? Or do you always start from a blank page, like a writer facing the terror of the empty sheet?

RdO: It depends. I can have a precise idea in mind—like with T32 (2021, see p. XX), for example. For that piece, I took as a model pages from a catalog of Dan Flavin’s works. It required great precision—there was no room for error. In other cases, I improvise more freely, and the choice of paper becomes crucial. I enjoy working with different kinds of paper to challenge myself and explore surface. I don’t relate to sandpaper the same way I do to photo paper.

EF: You’ve mentioned visual poetry, but most visual poets still respect the alphabet. You could be placed in that lineage, but for me, you go further.

RdO: Visual poetry was helpful to me, especially since I use typewriters. It taught me to break away from standardized writing. But from the beginning, I explored other ways of approaching the page and using the keyboard. My approach is more visual-arts oriented. The machine has become my medium—it no longer serves writing. It’s an instrument I’ve reinvented for my own use. I create books with a prepared typewriter. With ribbons and carbon paper, I’ve discovered another way of working with color that’s neither fully drawing nor fully painting, but relates to both.

EF: With your cut textiles, as with modifying typewriter keys, you don’t build up—you remove. Those small voids you create in the fabric structure the work entirely.

RdO: Yes, and light plays an important role. In those textile pieces, I immediately saw a connection with film perforations and 6x6 slide formats. I started out as a photographer and would have loved to shoot with a Bolex. the textiles are the counterpoint to the typewriter work. I don’t type—I open, with a cutter.

EF: One thing that intrigues me is your very personal way of suspending your fabrics using fluorescent tubes. You just said that for you the typewriter is a medium not meant for writing—and now you’re using fluorescent tubes in an entirely different way. How did that idea come about, which may seem odd at first, but is highly effective because of the voids the tubes create between the two sides of the hanging fabric?

RdO: From the start, I used out-of-order fluorescent tubes that I recovered from trash bins. They’re like readymade white lines. I appreciate their fragility and the danger they potentially hold due to the mercury inside. Like paper, the tube costs next to nothing. It lets me double the fabric with a gap between the layers. It’s not far from being a free canvas, and in some cases, it can evoke an Op art grid or a building facade. The tube no longer lights up, but I reactivate it by using it as a support. I symbolically reconnect it to the wall with two nails. The tactile and sensual quality is similar to my typed surfaces, which sometimes resemble textiles.

EF: How do you interpret the shift from fullness to emptiness?

RdO: Emptiness, for me, first has a mental dimension. I start with fullness—the alphabet, language—and move toward a writing emptied of meaning, close to silence. When I cut into a piece of geometric patterned fabric, I’m adding emptiness. In both cases, I’m seeking space.

EF: Since we started this conversation talking about Mallarmé, we can end with him too and talk about your version—Coup de dés – Trames (2018)—which I find so subtle and nearly mysterious, thanks to your use of transparency.

RoD: I bought a large-format typewriter, with a 90-cm carriage, which allowed me to respect the format Mallarmé intended for the poem. I traced the volumes corresponding to the poem’s words on sheets of tracing paper and plain paper. Then, beneath the tracing paper, I slid a carbon sheet and a piece of fabric, and struck the keys following the outlines. The resulting texture seems to have a vibration, a kind of tremor. I’m especially fond of that version because I feel I was able, with my analog, abstract language, to erase Mallarmé’s written words and let the traces emerge—what I call trames—weaves or frameworks.