For our inaugural cohorot of Curatorial Fellows, The Poetry Project was honored to welcome four curators and curatorial teams – Tierra Narrative; Bryn Evans; xime izquierdo ugaz and edua restrepo-castaño; and Alexandra Tatarsky! More details about each of their series below.
Founded in 2017, Tierra Narrative is a multidisciplinary, multimedia production house and collective creating spaces for transnational conversations and collaborations between the Central American diaspora and the homelands. Tierra Narrative’s plurality and horizontal structure aims toward collective authorship in curation and creative practices. During the course of the 2021 Curatorial Fellowship, The Poetry Project will work with Tierra Narrative members Maryam Ivette Parhizkar and Òscar Moisés Díaz produced a series of events that centered and engaged the archive. These events activated a small library of queer poetics from Guatemala City, invited Salvadoran diaspora writers to respond to archival transnational Salvadoran films, and included a multimedia presentation and conversation with artists and poets on dream transits and the archives of the ancestral.
Bryn Evans is an artist and curator whose work fights for total abolition against violent institutions, declines co-optation, and creates a space that welcomes Blackness as a way forward to futurity. During the course of the 2021 Curatorial Fellowship, The Poetry Project will work with Bryn Evans to support events that speak to the necessity of art and poetry as a collaborative site that “can mobilize repair and relief where there seemingly is none.”
xime izquierdo ugaz’s and edua restrepo-castaño’s curatorial philosophies and praxes center translation and trans experience. They have visioned a thought-full radical borderless unborderable panamerican poetry party/revolution, steeped in and working from, through, and with boundless potentiality and queer trans languaged/not-yet-languageable futurity. Theirs is an intentional wor(l)d The Poetry Project wants to witness. We can’t wait to see you & them & all of us there.
Alexandra Tatarsky organized a series of linked events posing inquiry into breakdown, decay, and rot — a (de)composition class examining toxic foundations and remnants that might lay the ground for different possibilities of sustenance. Spanning genre, practice, and terrain, Tatarsky worked with The Poetry Project to organize events with participants who are guided by an intentional relationship to the earth as a daily practice of both practical engagement and wild imaginings.