Nonsite Curricula
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Table of Contents
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Poetic Materials wiki/workbook
To get the ball rolling on the Poetic Materials curriculum and the May 24 reading, here are a few Basinksi links:
Michael Basinski's author page on Ubuweb
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/index.html
Michael Basinski interviewed by Doug Holder, Lucid Moon Interview #5
http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com/interviews/basinski.shtml
A couple of essays/creative statements introducing his ways of thinking @ & making poems:
The New Concrete
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/concrete.html
The Sound Pome Today Must Come to Bum Impoemivsational
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/pome.html
and some examples of hand drawn visual pomes and Sound/performance material:
Vispo Guide Image Gallery
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/basinskiimagegallery1.html
BuffFluxus performance on Radio Radio
http://15-bufffluxus-radio-radio-ny-2003-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/588174
Watch for more stuff upcoming!
Poetic Material: from David Larsen
larsen material
Poetic Materials: from Michael Basinski archives
Here are a few pieces from Tanya Hollis and Wendy Kramer's personal correspondences with Mike:
Images are clickable, if you'd like to see full-size versions. Come see more stuff on Sunday!
Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice
Curriculum Description:
In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?
“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.
The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.
NONSITE: Translation event @ SF Camerawork
Join us Thursday evening, February 28, for a trio of presentations by:
Bruce Boone: Reading and discussing his translations of Pascal Quignard.
Susan Greene: Presenting and discussing her public art projects in Occupied Palestine.
Chris Nagler: Reading and discussing his translations of Alberto Masferrer.
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street
Thursday, Feb. 28
6-8 pm
415-512-2020
sfcamerawork.org
from Pascal Quignard's *Albucius* (trans. by Bruce Boone)
from Albucius, by Pascal Quignard
translated by Bruce Boone
"Reader"
When the present offers little joy and the inevitable months ahead bring only the prospect of repetition, monotony can be avoided by raiding the past. The thighs of the dead open, their stomachs (sweet with the passage of twenty-one hundred years) join and heal again. Secrets, certain puzzles better left not spoken, are dug up, and from little wooden beams, and from bird’s down, a nest is fashioned for some older patrician woman, a nest of the ancient Hebrew type. It’s a protection.
Things that once were true provide greater protection for falsity, and for the wishes stirred up by falsity, than some simple anachronistic plot or other, pieced together, scavenged from god-knows-where. Caius Albucius Silus existed. So did his declamations. I invented the nest I plunked Albucius into, Albucius with whatever warmth he has, his little life, his rheumatism, the few greens I threw in for the salad, and his melancholy. His ghost may thereby be gratified with a few colors, pleasures, perhaps a death even—who knows? I love this world and the stories whose invention is made possible by their absence.
In June 1989, I was alone and I was tired. I had jotted down 60 of these pages while seated on a wooden bench. Huge solemn crows flew across the ramparts of the imperial gardens in Tokyo.
There was a little turtle in the pond below the ramparts. It stuck its head out of the water approaching a wooden post near the bank. Its head created a wake of waves. Over and over, the bulk of its body pulled it down. I looked down at the green, aged, implacable, and scaly head. “Now how about that! It’s Augustus!” But could it somehow have failed to be? Today it surprises me more. This country where the taxi doors shut by themselves and where you take your shoes off to eat has buried me in an imaginary Rome more alive and flushed with blood than the faces of these Zen monks I came to talk to.
To my mind nothing surpasses the translation made by Henri Bornecque of the work of Seneca the Elder—that is, Seneca the Great. I can add I also owe much to a version Du Teil came out with, one that contained Quintilian the Rhetorician’s stories. This was under Cardinal Mazarin in the first half of August 1658. It was rather hot outside. The Port Royalist solitaries hadn’t yet slipped from favor. This is how I came to know happiness in the cool of those trees. I beautified my life with days I never lived.
Grenoble, July 1989
NONSITE || Tuesday 4/1: Susan Greene on translation and public art practice in occupied Palestine
"Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice" continues on Tuesday evening, April 1 with Susan Greene, who will present and discuss several of her public art projects in Palestine, while addressing the questions: What are some of the dynamics between translation and solidarity? And, when and how can public art activate social spaces?
at Get Lost Travel Books
1825 Market Street
(betwn. Valencia and Guerrero)
7 pm
Susan Greene is an artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her
practice straddles a range of cultural arenas, new media, and public art, while focusing on borders, migrations, decolonization and memory. Greene is one of four Jewish American women artists who formed Break the Silence Mural Project in 1989. Break the Silence artists have returned to Occupied Palestine numerous times to facilitate community mural projects, conduct arts workshops, and create sculpture in refugee camps in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Beit Hanoun and Rafah. They have presented their work to high school, university, and community audiences across the United States including at the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Alternative Museum in New York. The group has also produced an award winning video. Greene has led or participated in more than 30 public art projects worldwide. Originally from NYC, she has been a resident of the Bay Area 25 years. She teaches and directs the Learning Center at the San Francisco Art Institute.
NONSITE: Bruce Boone on Translation & Quignard
Please join Bruce Boone on Thursday, March 6th, for a more intimate follow-up discussion on translation and the work of Pascal Quignard.
This event is linked to the group translation event at SF Camerawork on February 28th. Texts relevant to the discussion can be found here.
For details including time and place, please sign up using the tab above, and the event organizer will contact you.
NONSITE: Chris Nagler on translation & Alberto Masferrer
Please join Chris Nagler on Monday, March 10th, for a more intimate follow-up discussion on translation and the work of Alberto Masferrer.
This event is linked to the group translation event at SF Camerawork on February 28th.
For details including time and place, please sign up using the tab above and the event organizer will contact you.
Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice: Curriculum Description and Spring Events
Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice
Curriculum Description :
In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?
“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.
The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.
Event:
Join us Thursday evening, February 28, for a trio of presentations by:
Bruce Boone: Reading and discussing his translations of Pascal Quignard.
Susan Greene: Presenting and discussing her public art projects in Occupied Palestine.
Chris Nagler: Reading and discussing his translations of Alberto Masferrer.
SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street
Thursday, Feb. 28
6-8 pm
415-512-2020
sfcamerawork.org
In the weeks immediately following this event, there will be a series of informal discussions by all three of the participants.
Bruce Boone: Thursday, March 6.
Chris Nagler: Monday, March 10.
Susan Greene: Tuesday, April 1.
For information regarding times and locations, contact rob.halpern@gmail.com.
Curriculum resources and materials will be continually updated and posted at www.nonsitecollective.org under “Curricula” (click on “Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice”).
Bruce Boone is the author of My Walk with Bob (1978), The Truth about Ted (1979), and Century of Clouds (1980). His translations include Pacific Wall, by Jean-François Lyotard; two works by Georges Bataille, Guilty and On Nietzsche; as well as a number of works by Pascal Quignard, including Albucius, and Apronenia Avitia. He is currently at work translating Quignard’s Wandering Shadows as part of his ongoing commitment to finding an English reading audience for Quignard, whose remarkable fictions combine “faux translations,” historical texts, invented stories, philosophical meditations, and autobiographical fragments. Sample the work under "Curricula" on this site.
Susan Greene is an artist, educator and clinical psychologist. Her practice straddles a range of cultural arenas, new media, and public art, while focusing on borders, migrations, decolonization and memory. Greene is one of four Jewish American women artists who formed Break the Silence Mural Project in 1989. Break the Silence artists have returned to Occupied Palestine numerous times to facilitate community mural projects, conduct arts workshops, and create sculpture in refugee camps in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Beit Hanoun and Rafah. They have presented their work to high school, university, and community audiences across the United States including at the San Francisco Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Alternative Museum in New York. The group has also produced an award winning video. Greene has led or participated in more than 30 public art projects worldwide. Originally from NYC, she has been a resident of the Bay Area 25 years. She teaches and directs the Learning Center at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Christian Nagler is a writer and performer. Most recently he has been dancing with Anna Halprin's Sea Ranch Collective, and writing a novel about the bodily effects of U.S. public policy. He is co-coordinator, with Amanda Eicher, of the Colima Project, a community art and oral history project in Colima, El Salvador, which is the site of one of the last remaining agricultural cooperatives in that country. He is currently translating the work the early twentieth-century Salvadorean writer / philosopher / political economist Alberto Masferrer, whose writing offers a powerful lens on the history of geopolitical conflict in Central America. Chris’s project engages with issues ranging from land reform and the erasure of indigenous life in El Salvador, to the social philosophy of Vitalismo and the political uses of translation.