How do poetry and the visual relate to each other? This event in the 2025 Cambridge Festival, co-ordinated by Prof Hugo Azérad, explores the intermedial that is central to contemporary creation with a set of recent texts from French and English writers who inject in their writing – from the very start – a mix of languages, voices and pictures, continuously collaborating with film makers, musicians, actors and dancers. The presentation will include an all-age presentation of the bilingual edition of Riddles and Spells, by Richard Berengarten, a poet who lives in Cambridge. The text is accessible to the youngest readers, with delicious shifts of meaning and mischievous verbal mixes.

Geneviève Guétemme is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Orléans, France. Her research focuses on collecting and studying cultural and artistic images of displacement. Her continuous collaboration with artists and poets stands at the interface between drawing, photography and text. She investigates the ability of images to initiate an inclusive and hospitable process while reflecting the profoundest qualities in poems.