Workshop
How to Build a Grass Hut; 5-Session Workshop with Latif Askia Ba
If we break open the ekphrastic mode beyond static visual art, to moving image, mixed media, performance, events, & protest, what does this aperture offer us? A critical mass of collective experience? How can a moment as transient yet as powerful as a flashpoint be recorded as a blueprint for ongoing resistance? How does the proliferation of poetry around a moment create nets of connection, strengthen collective resistance, and build narrative/anti-narrative power? When thinking of Cecilia Vicuña’s lines “A poem only becomes poetry when its structure / is made not of words but of forces,” we are moved to transform language into the physical. In this generative workshop, I wish to complicate Vicuña’s lines: from linear (poetry→action) to parallel circuitry where the “resistance” to collective action falls—through the simultaneity of strategy.
For inspiration, we’ll look to: Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, David Wojnarowicz, Renee Gladman, Edward Salem, Dionne Brand, Gwendolyn Brooks, Juliana Spahr, Etel Adnan, & Nicolas Moufarrege.
