Mónica de la Torre
Long Island City, NY
Mónica de la Torre is a poet born and raised in Mexico City whose writing engages translation, performance, and the visual arts. Her most recent book is Repetition Nineteen, which centers on experimental translation. Other books include The Happy End/All Welcome—a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain. She has published several books in Spanish, including Taller de Taquimecanografía, written jointly with the eponymous women artists’ collective she co-founded. She is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine; an editor for Señal, Ugly Duckling Presse’s chapbook series of Latin American poetry in translation; and with Alex Balgiu, co-edited the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79. Her work has appeared in Midst, Artforum, Granta, the Believer, the Paris Review, and NY Review, among other publications. Recent prose can be found in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats and as an afterword to George Perec’s Ellis Island. She teaches at Brooklyn College.
Photo: Carolina Passerini
Book cover of Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen.
Book cover of Mónica de la Torre’s The Happy End/ All Welcome.
Spread from Secretos, by Iñaki Bonillas, featuring Mónica de la Torre’s contribution, “Nine Doors: A Guided Tour.”
Spread from Secretos, by Iñaki Bonillas, featuring Mónica de la Torre’s contribution, “Nine Doors: A Guided Tour.”
Spread from Secretos, by Iñaki Bonillas, featuring Mónica de la Torre’s contribution, “Nine Doors: A Guided Tour.”
Parallel Interiors
Mónica de la Torre is a poet born and raised in Mexico City whose writing engages translation, performance, and the visual arts.
Artist BioIn a book-length literary hybrid whose working title is Parallel Interiors, Mónica de la Torre weaves together research centering on the Cuban-born industrial designer Clara Porset and memories of growing up in a part of Mexico City built upon modernist utopias developed by architects such as Luis Barragán. Exiled in Mexico City after studying with Josef and Anni Albers at Black Mountain College, Porset designed the interiors of numerous public and private buildings at the height of her career in the 1940s and ’50s. She sought to revalorize folk art and bring affordable syncretic designs to the people. De la Torre grew up in Mexico City in the 1970s and ’80s, where she was surrounded by manifestations of the ideals of modernist architects and artists, yet Porset’s work was unbeknownst to her at the time. In Parallel Interiors, de la Torre revisits her past through the eyes of the present and explores the histories embodied by rooms and objects as well as the parts of us the built environment can hold.