Did you ever cheat on a test when you were in school? I didn’t. I was afraid of getting caught and lacked the ingenuity to come up with places to hide the answers or the audacity to seize an opportunity. I never had the guts to stare a teacher in the eyes while masking any number of undisclosed little wrongdoings. Yet, this scenario was the inspiration for the new experimental art book Torpedos (cheat sheet) by Chilean writer Yanko González Cangas.
Torpedos (Kultrún Editions, 2024) is a gigantic, 900-page hardcover volume that explores the unlawful act of cheating through readymades, resulting in an atypical reading experience. It is a kind of game board, a deck of tarot cards, or a cabinet of curiosities. Once you have the book in your hands, you will find no introduction besides a small preface. Inside are six life-size objects that a reader can remove: a small measuring tape, a white rubber eraser, a fifteen-centimeter wooden ruler, a pair of black glasses, a silver ring, and a mechanical pencil. Each object conceals a poem. If you press the top of the pencil, this poem is revealed in a display window: “donde dice línea, es forma. donde colores, / texturas y donde ritmo, orden. qué es el arte. / colgar en un muro las cosas que alguna vez te / hicieron daño” (where it says line, is it form. where colors, / textures, and where rhythm, order. what is art? / hanging on a wall the things that once hurt you.) In some objects, the poetry is a deviation of its function. For example, the eraser ceases to be an eraser with an incision that reveals a poem: “¿para qué llueve? llueve para dar énfasis / llueve para no ir. llueve para enterrar a / alguien. llueve para callarse un rato. para botar / la mirada en una poza. para usar los signos de / interrogación” (why does it rain. it rains to give emphasis. it rains to not go. it rains to bury / someone. it rains to keep quiet a while. to cast your eyes in puddle. to use the question marks). At the end of the book is another book—camouflaged and much smaller—presented traditionally with a hundred verses, all of them inspired by González Cangas’s main theme: the rules are meant to be broken.
Even though its format might sound strange and radical, Torpedos embraces a fruitful and long-standing tradition of experimental books in the Chilean and Latin American art scene. This is a tradition that questions the supremacy of the written language by clashing words with images or seeing the visual qualities of words and recognizing their conceptual value.
Yanko González Cangas, Torpedos, 2024. Photo by Carolina Urzúa. Courtesy of Il Posto.
As an accompaniment, the author presented a group of thirty framed collages in an eponymous exhibition at Il Posto Documentos in Santiago. For these compositions, he gathered childhood drawings, school tables and records, his watch, calculator, boxes of medicine, and an immense number of other objects and printed material that he mixed and wrote on. In one composition, a black-and-white image of an old calculator and a table of numbers is collaged with an actual calculator that contains a poem in it. In another one, the remains of a wooden pencil with poems are carefully placed on a blue background and covered with a translucid structure forming a boat window. In both book form, via readymades, and as collages curated for a viewer, a pencil or a scrap of papers become the author’s way of calling out to the analogue conditions of this type of art made with hands that organize visual references and objects.
González Cangas’s book-making process was two-fold: go-with-the-flow writing sessions (with words and images), inspired by cheating on a test, paired with an art-and-craft-like elaboration of each part of the book. The writing reflects the author’s note-taking while attending boring meetings or his observations made throughout his academic research, as well as absurd administration documents and emails that he printed out. Some of the book’s poems speak of this scholastic inspiration: “Respetado profesor: no hice la tarea que usted pidió / Tengo muchas razones para entrar a un bosque, pero no / tengo ninguna para no haberle entregado la etnografía.” (Dear Professor: I did not do the task that you asked for. / I have many reasons for entering a forest, but none / for not being able to deliver the ethnography.)
Yanko González Cangas, Torpedos, 2024. Photo by Carolina Urzúa. Courtesy of Il Posto.
The poet often worked alone as the book came to life, writing, gluing all the print material, cutting the eraser, and so on. But sometimes he invited friends and colleagues from different parts of the world to participate in his adventure: England, China, and the south of Chile, where he lives and works. Some collaborators gathered with González Cangas in intimate writing sessions. The making became a collective enterprise, which created a special timeline for the book—free from the demands of institutions and publishers—by inhabiting a playfulness in a creation process that spanned more than a decade.
Thus, Torpedos is designed to be played, performed, and displayed. As the author put it in one of his verses: “la / única manera de tocar un poema es con la boca” (the only way to touch a poem is with the mouth). To do so, you will need a comfortable space and time with the proper audience. It could be on a Sunday afternoon with friends around a center table, or maybe at a dinner party with colleagues you want to impress. Or perhaps with your lover, having breakfast with coffee. As with the Jumanji board, you can feel the excitement of every concealed object wanting (and waiting patiently) to escape from its wooden container. With his book, González Cangas is inviting us to break the rules against an internet-driven world by using our hands and closing the screens.
Yanko González Cangas, Torpedos, 2024. Photo by Signe Klöpper.
Torpedos is full of contradictions, and that is part of its genius. The heaviness of the book contrasts with the fragility of its readymades; the slowness of its creation process is shocked by the sharpness of the strike against rules. Before an encounter, a reader might be tempted to think that such contradictions hamper González Cangas’s efforts. But that reader would be mistaken. The book does not lose momentum from a supposed chaos or incoherence. It is a pathway, a door that opens up our minds to inquisitiveness, playfulness, and irony. For instance, one poem reads: “el mundo tiene una puerta pero ya no le queda / ningún cuarto” (the world has a door, but it no longer has / any rooms). Another: “las excusas de quien abre la / puerta para ver si es el mismo quien golpea.” (the excuses of those who open a / door to see is the same as those who knock.)
González Cangas is an artist whose own career has blurred boundaries. He has taught as an academic, written as a poet, and with Torpedos, has now embarked into the visual arts. In 1999, he published Héroes civiles y santos laicos. Palabra y periferia: trece entrevistas a escritores del sur de Chile (Barba de Palo Editions), which explores issues of memory, Indigenous heritage, and identity in the transitional decade between dictatorship and democracy in Chile. As a poet, he toys with day-to-day, ordinary observations of urban characters in books such as Metales Pesados (Kultrún Editions, 1998) or Alto Volta (Kultrún Editions, 2007). In his latest, Elábuga (Kultrún Editions, 2011), he imagines his own death from the perspective of his friends. Sordid and cynical, the poems are written on top of illustrated tombs in a graveyard. In Torpedos, readers have the opportunity to further engage with González Cangas’s intellectual and literary oeuvre.
In this way, González Cangas follows the paths of writers like Nicanor Parra, with his Artefactos (1972), a form of political satire printed on postcards during the administration of Socialist president Salvador Allende. Or Juan Luis Martínez, in his La poesía chilena (1978), a box that includes photos, clips, and earth samples, among other things, centered on an ironic and playlike text experimenting with the history of Chilean poetry. In the context of censorship during the dictatorship, Martínez used his nontraditional book to question the concept of tradition by examining the lives of several important Chilean writers such as Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, and Pablo Neruda. Torpedos even dialogues with exiled artists like Guillermo Deisler, who founded the collaborative magazine UNI/vers (1987–94), which appealed to the value of communal creative work and trespassed the barriers of national boundaries and political environments by commissioning contributors across the world.
Yanko González Cangas, Torpedos, 2024. Photo by Signe Klöpper.
While Torpedos is a notable continuation of this experimental tradition, González Cangas’s book comes at a peculiar cultural moment. Specifically, it follows the 2019 Chilean revolt and the failing of both new constitutional proposals. More broadly, acceleration, optimization, and competition mark the pace of contemporary creativity. We are living in a “flattened” world, as writer Kyle Chayka describes the present moment in which algorithms want to model our behavior in order to guide us, correct us, and move us around more quickly, efficiently, and easily. It is this ease that results in the flattening where curiosity, autonomy, randomness, and difference are erased. But in an era defined by screens, I believe González Cangas attempts to resist the menace of technological overwhelm by creating a book that celebrates the magic of wrongdoings, misleadings, and cheap tricks that are part of human audacity and creativity.
It is, in a way, a mystery box that shows a reader a possible future based on their own imagination. “no las horas. aprende a leer las / olas y anticipa como romperán. sabemos cómo / leer las runas o la borra pero no cómo leer las pisadas / en espiral. la mano consigue lo que desea / el ojo,” the poet writes. (not the hour. learn to read the / waves and anticipate how they’ll break. we know how / to read the ruins or coffee grounds but not the spiraled footsteps. / the hand gets what the /eye wants)
Now, whenever I hold my own glasses, I can’t help but expect to find a poem hidden in them. While writing in my notepad, I fantasize not about receiving spontaneous, pure inspiration, but about the wisdom that might come from my supposedly innocent pen. When I look around at my desk, my thoughts drift, searching for places that could contain the magic of a verse. Everywhere outside, I see people using technology, and I imagine what unplugged games they are missing. I cannot help but wonder about the endless possibilities of the written language.
Translations by Jessica Rainey and Ignacio Szmulewicz R.
