The Poetry Project is pleased to announce ROT TALKS, the series of events programmed by Curatorial Fellow, artist and writer Alexandra Tatarsky. ROT TALKS will facilitate explorations in decomposition as method and as metaphor, stewarded by artists, poets, and citizen scientists in collaboration with materials of industry and earth.
ROT TALKS will feature readings, experimental lectures, and installations on the poetics of rot from thinkers who are interested in breaking down as a regenerative mode. Following the throughlines of decomposition and rot, the poet-artist-researchers that Tatarsky has invited delve into and question the following affects and strategies: delight in ferment, how to heal the post-industrial earth, and playful devotion to discard. In collaboration across discipline and expertise, the series aims the audience towards healing through rearrangement of scattered and broken parts.
Poem-performances engage gleaning as sculpture and etymology as decomposition. Five artists of undoing share strategies of breakage and decay, exploring how rust and plastic function as both construction materials and metaphors for change over time. Accompanied by a streaming installation.
Basie Allen + Cassandra Mayela / slow braised in yuck / with freaks
stone -- tire -- shells -- sponge -- nails -- brick -- garments -- painting as poem -- knots + untying
Rolando Politi / Trash is a weed… by nature I have always been a worshipper.
winter flowers -- packaging inferno -- throwaway society -- trash worship -- ceremony -- heaps
Kenya (Robinson) / AST ROT URF ING
privilege as plastic material -- enigma + identity -- nurture that muscle -- etymological tarot -- “woowoo” words
Sparrow / Happiness is like a weed we see but cannot identify
headless poems -- garbage pasted onto garbage -- earth as a muffin -- tentative brightening