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ECOPOETICS @ BERKELEY
The term ecopoetics has become increasingly important to scholars and poets alike. It is certainly a critical moment for the field and practice. Please join us in February for a three-day conference that will focus specifically on exploring ecopoetics, taking up such questions as: What is ecopoetics? What representational strategies and sociopolitical commitments might characterize [...]
THE RIVER A CHECKOUT COUNTER
My mobile talk through Cathy Wilkes’s devastating installation “I Give you All My Money” at the Renaissance Society in Chicago on February 11, 2012, titled “The Nurse in the Marketplace.” With thanks to Wilkes for having generously shared her as-yet unpublished writings, which turn the languages of both criticism and commodification inside out.
REMEMBER THAT?
PARK at Fresh Kills #2, verbose, saxophone-struck, wander-threaded wind at the dump summit of a November noon, in the captured unstill pixels of participants.
WILL YOU EAT YOUR STOCKS AND BONDS?
Was a refrain of the magnificent 3-hour study in labor and the stars, digitality and dust, pre- and re-cession at the Defibrillator Gallery by Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery earlier this week.
HORN OF PLENTY, EMPTY
Our iLAB residency and fieldwork for PARK at Fresh Kills comes to a close tomorrow: with strings, post-consumer waste, a phantom city block and chorus, dance, and empty horns of plenty:
FIRST FIGS
And the seasons begin to cycle as each day brings another spur for vulnerability, another adieu and another resolution to self vis-a-vis composer Paul of the bidirectionality of time in circles.
HUNGRY CITY: ROME
The history of Rome traced through food and its conduits, followed by Fritz’s gorgeous installations of aperitifs & dinner in roof tiles moving the crowd from orto to cortile, lit by a chandelier of twig & leaf, Mona finally sitting down to eat with us: and having through it all to come face to face [...]
PUREE & CODECRACKING OF THE DAY
Eggplant and mint, we taste, so much more exquisite than is photographable—overseen by as-ever enthralling epitaphs glimpsed anew in this quotidian dream that taunt us with the desire to know more and more language, and with the need for time, insatiable.
DIRECT DEMOCRACY
First vote in this country: 4 yeses supported by more than 95% of voters: no to privatizing water, letting powerful criminals loose, development of nuclear power. “And yet the wind still breathes….”: rundown of how to vote last weekend posted on the door for a social club of old men wearing derbys at dusk in [...]
PIAZZA AS WUZ
Occupying the ruins now framing a deejay set ranging from Volare to hiphop all’italiano and the hospitality of Earthquake Jack: scene of palpably postwar pregentrification Palermo.
BY DESIGN
Nature once again reflecting culture, making its own vertigo and mask for a friend in what remains of the ingeniously experimental Greek baths.
HOUSING SOLUTION IN ROME
Among the only feasible options in the historical center: just outside the Borgo, or the area of the Vatican, adjacent to the hospital set up for pilgrims: bright & with a view for as long as they’ll allow it (law banning mobile homes on the Janiculum in momentum).
X LOCUS (ABLUVION)
“For those who submitted to disorientation, it was a success.” “Submit,” says Tom: “that’s the perfect word.” An old archaeologist friend, alongside whom I worked at my first and only dig, two decades ago, veering over the hole listening for voices. Hearing the unconscious, seeing the strata of history in the strata of bricks above [...]
OPEN STUDIOS @ THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME
Come see X Locus (Abluvion), a collaborative installation by Jennifer Scappettone (text/sound design), Paul Rudy (sound design), and Agency Architecture (environmental media), at the Open Studios event at the American Academy in Rome Wednesday, 25 May, 2011. Il consiglio di amministrazione dell’American Academy in Rome William B. Hart, Presidente del consiglio di amministrazione Adele Chatfield-Taylor, [...]
L’ACQUA NON SI VENDE/WATER IS PUBLIC
A sticker bedecking the she-wolf-head fountains around town. Once Massimo Cacciari started getting on the bandwagon, they began to call the tap water in Venice “the mayor’s water.” Don’t sell it: vote for public water on the referendum of 12-13 June. In Rome, where providing water to the public is a glorious tradition, a friend [...]
TRAGEDIA DELL’ASCOLTO/TRAGEDY OF LISTENING
“Now that’s quite a responsibility,” says Kathleen, deathly serious from the Piazza San Cosimato, as I tell her of the site of the sound piece in progress. All day spent in the dark tavern carving bypasses of voices from the literal underground. Carving from the blindness resulting from the hegemony of vision in this culture, [...]
IL CAFFÉ,…DOLCE, AMARO, INDOMABILE SERPENTE
Delighted to find a poem by the counter of the Casa del Caffé in the Campus Martius—a tradition in Italy, it seems—so that even the hairdresser’s business card is full of rhymes— “Coffee, it rustles my soul, like wind on the mount that breaks in amongst the oaks and loosens and agitates the limbs, sweetbitter, [...]
POPPIES AND AQUEDUCTS
The Acqua Claudia, highest aqueduct of all, serving thus each quarter high and low of Rome, now backdrop straight out of Pasolini for the starring poppies & weekend runners of Cinecittà and Centocelle.
USCITA 43/EXIT 43
The introduction to our performance at Corto Circuito tonight, in Italian: Queste partiture “pop-up” fanno parte di un progetto in corso, intitolato Uscita 43, che è composto di elementi poetici, visivi, e sonori. Lo descrivo come un’archeologia di paesaggi tossici e afflitti, e un’operetta di cori “pop-up” (prendendo il termine usato per le finestre “pop-up” [...]
SKYLINE SQUAT
“New York City” and its scrapings of sky seen from the perspective of its underbelly, the swollen dump mounds shrouded in plastics.
EXIT 43 WITH DIFFORME ENSEMBLE: SATURDAY NIGHT
Performing pop-up choruses surrounding postpastoral landscapes from Exit 43/Uscita 43 with the Difforme Ensemble (Marco Ariano, Renato Ciunfrini, Roberto Fega) and with Ersela Kripa & Karen Yasinsky this Saturday night at the Centro Sociale Corto Circuito in Cinecittà: be there/ sii lì!
FINANCE IN STONE (OR LEAD-COATED REPLICAS)
Puzzled indeed to find neoclassicism masking another paradox in the pediment sculpture of the core of global speculation: Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, among which bend heavily, here, Agriculture and Mining. It is the work of John Quincy Adams Ward and Paul Wayland Bartlett—carved in marble however by “the Piccirilli brothers.” The NYSE notes [...]
HILL AS CACHE, AS INVISIBILITY, AS STRATEGY
At Fresh Kills, double to Mannahatta, with Kathy Westwater, Seung Jae Lee, Leigh Draper, and Raj Kottamasu, gearing up toward our residency for PARK, a view of the East Mound of solid waste becoming laboriously yet strategically a mountain by way of 280 gas extraction wells and plastic and other geosynthetic, permanent or impermanent impermeabilities: [...]