What Happens After the End
A four-part series with Andrea Abi-Karam, Susan Briante, Kite aka Suzanne Kite, and Eileen Muza
About the series
This is a four-part online series and will take place on Zoom.
Dates: Mondays, March 13, April 12, May 10, and June 7, 2021
Time: 7-8:15pm EST
Free, register via Eventbrite here.
These events will include live captioning in English.
Livestreaming will also occur on Youtube.
In the aftermath of a traumatic event(s), how does one shape their practice beyond survival and towards new ways of being? This four-part series will include guests from different artistic disciplines speaking in conversation to examine and unpack what it means to create and be a maker in this contemporary moment. Organized and moderated by Erika Hodges, the series examines a set of issues including but not limited to: process, intentional community, far-reaching trauma and how it impacts our art practice, as well as new possibilities that may have arisen over the last year for how work can look or be made. Each guest will share work or perform, followed by a short Q&A with the audience.
Schedule
Monday, March 15: Andrea Abi-Karam
Monday, April 12: Susan Briante
Monday, May 10: Suzanne Kite
Monday, June 7: Eileen Muza
About the organizer
Erika Hodges is a gender-expansive poet and performance artist living and breathing somewhere between Brooklyn and Boulder. They are a graduate of Naropa University and an MFA candidate at Pratt Institute. Their work can be found at Flag + Void, CALYX, The Adirondack Review, and The Poetry Project among others. They are a 2021 Can Serrat residency fellow. Erika works as a poet's assistant, editor, and archivist. Their work and life are deeply devoted to queer love, troubling borders and binaries, and the idea of lineage and poetry as a sort of home. They will be pursuing their JD next fall, where they hope to continue the work of shaping language that can move us toward liberation.
About the speakers
Andrea Abi-Karam is an Arab-American genderqueer punk poet-performer cyborg, writing on the art of killing bros, the intricacies of cyborg bodies, trauma, and delayed healing. Selected by Bhanu Khapil, Andrea’s debut EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), is a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. Simone White selected their second assemblage, Villainy for publication in Fall 2021 at Nightboat Books. With Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a rollerblading Leo currently obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.
Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics, and the state. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories” and a “dazzlingly inventive and searching text.” Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders all from Ahsahta Press. Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and (most recently) the Ucross Foundation. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program. The program brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. For the inaugural 2019 Toronto Art Biennial, Kite, with Althea Thauberger, produced an installation, Call to Arms, which features audio and video recordings of their rehearsals with Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) York, which also consisted of a live performance with the conch shell sextet, who played the four musical scores composed by Kite. Kite has also published in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.
Eileen Muza is an artist living and working in the ghost town of Cisco UT. Eileen uses found materials for her work to restore the existing buildings in the town while also creating a livable sculpture in doing so for the past 6 years. Eileen has always lived in cities previously and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and although formally trained in drawing and painting Eileen has always found more freedom to experiment in a field she was never expected to be good at—construction as an art form. Eileen believes that the space we occupy has power over the way we think and feel as vulnerable creatures needing not only shelter from the elements but an overall sense of being embraced by the past and others holding that same need in a different time. Eileen has been learning from the previous and long-dead occupants of the ghost town in many ways, creatively and otherwise. When town is 45 minutes away a person must be creative with their choice of materials and it's best to use what is at hand which allows for a lot of experimentation and good mistakes. When it comes to building a raised bed for a garden, Eileen prefers to use a refrigerator flipped on its back as a pre-insulated vessel for her herbs to thrive in. Eileen is an artist who (for reasons she doesn't even fully understand!) likes to work in the realm of scarcity and the unknown. Eileen views this ruined and abandoned town as a chance to build it up again with full knowledge of its imminent destruction as an uninhabitable, waterless place ready to fall back into the ground at any moment.