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.
Radical mycologists and poets offer ruminations on rot as sustenance for growth. Lecture-experiments draw from metaphors of the mushroom: the fleshy spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus that troubles the distinction between singular and collective. Accompanied by a sound installation.
William Padilla Brown / Tiny intricate things
cordyceps -- zombie mushroom -- parasite -- host tissue -- aphrodisiac -- oxygen
manuel arturo abreu / My screen protector is definitely the dirtiest part of my body
Rot Semantics -- decayed teeth -- out of the death of metaphors -- glitch -- entheogeny -- ‘spoiled’ energy -- reanimating the undead -- divination
Cecilia Vicuña / pitch, a fertile / rite / a little / broken pitch / er
precarios -- basuritas -- ecological destruction -- PALABRARmas -- unravelling words
Tracie Morris / Her her button. Her boutonniere. Her boobeleh. Her boo. Her Too. Her Tooklas. Her view. Her book. Herbal.
sound poetry teases apart the meaning -- so what i try to do is pull these things apart -- it is the ground -- it's dirty -- reverberation and accumulative alterations