Poem #2 is organized in friendship with the project by Paula Caspão Expanded Practices All Over (2019-2022) -a space for multidimensional study across a series of encounters, this time with invitee Fred Moten.
Expanded Practices All Over dwells in indeterminacy, at the blur of theory and fiction, between choreographic and theoretical affects from countless fields and underfields. It invites people to rehearse collective study and reinforce supportive grounds and surrounds for experimental uses of all sorts of practices across the arts, humanities and non humanities. Sometimes wary of the charming elasticity of the expression ‘expanded practices’ and their currently overestimated degrees of ‘critically-creative research’, ‘intermediation’ and ‘performativity’ – as well as of their inevitable complicities with the growing de-funding and de-materialization of public services – EPAO gives special attention to the kinds of sociality and work-life conditions a specific (expanded) practice may help legitimating, re-story-telling, re-story-sounding and/or interrogating, in each particular milieu and codependencies. Currently dealing with practices of collective reading and translating, EPAO became an abundant ground for interrogations regarding the sounds and movements an encounter with a book or page may generate, once it’s no longer a matter of mastering an understanding of what is (supposedly) stabilized by writing, but a continuous inter-rhythmic training (altered daily) in listening to multispecies zones of contact. What does expanded reading and translating have to do with fungi, specifically mycelia? What would be the Downton Abbey of artistic and/or academic theoretical reading? How is it maintained? Who/what feeds and dresses the bodies in case? How much electricity, undersea net cables, cotton fields, displaced communities? Who cleans the mess every day?
- Post-ASTROPOETRY by Elizabeth Ward
