REFILL: AN ANTHOLOGY IN DECOLONIAL EKPHRASIS
In October 2018, CalArts' School of Critical Studies and MakerCityLA awarded my collaborator Rosa Boshier and me the 2019 REEF Residency, which includes a project grant and 24-hour access to the MakerCityLA studios and gallery space. For our project, we are working toward a discipline that we have coined Decolonial Ekphrasis. Along with our own individual writing and art projects, we are curating and editing an anthology titled REFILL: An Anthology in Decolonial Ekphrasis. REFILL will include a print publication and an online component.
Ekphrasis is a Greek tradition of poetry in which the poem describes a work of art through language, deeply engaging not only in the intended meaning of the art object, but the underlying sociopolitical contexts of the art object’s making, and the poet’s relationship with the object and its artist. We are thinking of ekphrasis as a writing form to not only describe and contextualize art, but to interrogate the colonial histories and relationships that have gone into the making of an art object, and examine how those histories and relationships affect and inhabit us as postcolonial subjects and writers/thinkers. Decolonial ekphrasis is thus a discipline for viewing and [re]interpreting art, culture, and theory through a decolonial lens, engaging with reverberating colonial traumas, toward a productive haunting, healing, empowerment, and artmaking.
Images from our shared studio space at MakerCityLA
REFILL looks to interrogate modern objects of colonialism and re-activate them through creative production. Engaging in decolonial ekphrasis, we are seeking work that responds to, participates in, and interfaces with objects of colonial lineage and trauma. We are thinking about ekphrasis as an attempt to refill empty symbols, colonial and sexual implications of mestizaje, faux activism, identity as capital, collective cultural practice, avatars on the internet, reclamation of erotics, and the instrumentalization of WOC bodies.
Objects I Carry: Mid-Res Show
Refill: A Reading and Exhibition (4.28.19, MakerCityLA)
Along with the other 2019 REEF Residents, we hosted a Mid-Residency show entitled Objects I Carry, after the work of fellow REEF resident artist, Cynthia Velasquez. As part of the Mid-Res show, Rosa and I curated a reading entitled REFILL: Exercises in Decolonial Ekphrasis, which featured the writers Angel Dominguez, B.A. Williams, Maryam Kazeem, Christine Imperial, and Cynthia Velasquez, along with the work of artists Aydinaneth Ortiz, Karla Canseco, and Christal Perez.
Poet Angel Dominguez reads unpublished work from Desgraciado
