Y’all Are Fucked Up

“I sing and the moon lingers/I dance and my shadow flails”
Drinking Alone with the Moon, Li Bo as translated by Jia Sung
It has been more than fifty years since a human landed on the moon. But the human relationship to the earth’s closest celestial neighbor has lasted much longer and will persist after the last shreds of the United States flag planted there eventually fall into the void. In this five-week workshop, we will consider the manifold meanings of the moon, and moons, as muse, territory, utopia, conspiracy, symbol, relative and stranger. As NASA and a number of other national agencies seek to return to the moon, alongside the seeming return of Cold War dynamics and the recursions of colonial forms of expansion/extraction, we will think with counter imaginaries of the moon, and by extension the earth, through engagement with lunatexts. Lunatexts dwell with the irrational, mysterious, erotic, anti-colonial, and unpropertied ways of relating to land and place.
The workshop will involve collective study of a number of works across a variety of media, poetic and otherwise, from authors and artists including Federico Garcia Lorca, Gil Scot-Heron, Simon Ortiz, Mosab Abu Toha, Renee Gladman, Nam June Paik, Mona Benyami, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. Participants are encouraged to bring in their own lunar references to share. There will also be time devoted to the writing and creating of new lunatexts. If the skies permit, some particular sessions will be held outdoors under the moon. Howling encouraged.