New Subdivisions (2011), 13 × 20 cm, 60 pages

 

About the Book

New Subdivisions (2011) marks a decisive moment in Marcello Mercado’s practice, where language becomes a primary material subjected to processes of fragmentation, surveillance and systemic pressure. Written as experimental poetry, the book operates less as a literary object than as a textual infrastructure—one that absorbs vocabularies drawn from biology, technology, military systems, pharmacology and social control.

The text unfolds without narrative progression or stable point of origin. Instead, it accumulates statements, interruptions and signals, producing a linguistic field governed by repetition, division and displacement. The recurrent use of the first person does not articulate subjectivity but exposes it as a monitored, regulated and continuously reprogrammed entity.

In retrospect, New Subdivisions anticipates Mercado’s later investigations into coding, residue, algorithmic mediation and the body as archive. Here, language already functions as a system under stress: watched, irradiated, measured and subdivided by external forces. The book can be read as an early model of the artist’s broader practice, where meaning is not expressed but processed, compressed and left deliberately unresolved.

Positioned between poetry, conceptual writing and media archaeology, New Subdivisions proposes text as a site of operation—an unstable interface where biological rhythms, technical infrastructures and political anxieties intersect.