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.
Artists whose work resides in the in-between of dancing and farming, social sculpture and foraging, poetry and food magic, share their experiments with processing toxins and devouring dirt. Some tasty morsels may be served.
Narendra Haynes / Months of decay...
degraded powder with mealworm trails - devouring styrofoam - digestive processing - the sound of pathways
Candace Thompson / Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet
hugelkultur -- feral edible -- ginkgo nut -- wastelands -- brink -- extractive appetite -- petrochemical sacrifice zone -- arsenic, cadmium, lead -- disused tarmac -- wild brew
Precious Okoyomon / I would write poems and put them in trees and dig holes in the ground and plant them in the earth.
earthseed -- monstrous kudzu -- invasive threat -- wild pink peppercorns -- myrmecology -- King Lear -- dissociation + daydream -- spiral theory -- God
mayfield brooks / Sounding, singing, shouting… ancestors, revolutionaries, ocean, air and earth.
collective dreams -- rupture settler colonial logic -- shimmer + shine -- improvising + farming -- body under compost -- I danced myself out of the dirt -- flowers + letters -- weight of decay