The Nonsite Collective's investigation around the Poetics of Disablement that began last year with Bhanu Kapil, Amber DiPietra, and Thom Donovan will continue with three events during May and June, beginning Saturday afternoon, May 16, with a presentation by Robert Kocik:
Saturday, May 16 at 3:30 pm
935 Natoma, btwn 10th and 11th,
and btwn Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART
(The program will continue May 23 w/Norma Cole and Amber DiPietra, and then on June 6 w/ Michael Davidson and Sue Schweik)
Robert Kocik, poet, essayist, artist, design/builder, lives in Brooklyn where he directs the Bureau of Material Behaviors. His architectural works are committed to the realization of 'missing' functions, services, organizations, or agencies. He is currently developing a building based on 'prosody' and poets' imagined importance to our society. With the choreographer Daria Faïn, he has initiated a field of research called The Prosodic Body. His publications include: Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007).
Kocik's many contributions to the Nonsite discussion emerging from last year's events--including architectural drawings based on the collective's draft proposal--are archived on a new workbook page devoted to the collaborative organization of resources and the evolving elaboration of ideas related to the Poetics of Disablement:
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/632
For materials related to last year's events, see:
http://nonsitecollective.org/node/645
On the subject of disability and poetics, referring to recent Nonsite events and discussions, Kocik writes:
"I can't, for myself, refine and redefine the issue of disability as an end in itself--just as you caution against reiterating the limits of our bodies and our communality. When you say that we still don't even know what a body can do, this accords with my stating that ability is so extremely unexplored that we scarcely have reference to it (as social or subjective bodies). This lack of reference, perhaps the very basis of disablement."
And then:
"Every kind of work I do deals in disability. To make matters worse(even richer) I went to the collective’s site and re-traced the history of the disability discourse -- combining Amber DiPietra’s “How can we have a dialogue around disability and poetics, not just at the political or social level, but at a generative level -- one that begets new experiments in writing? To live with or study disability is to be constantly questioning form and constantly working toward formal innovation—whether that is through accessible architecture or the far reaches of cyber humanity. How can this be translated to syntax and the raw stuff of poetry?” with Eleni’s: “disability founds aesthetics -- for all persons, not just those with disabilities. If we became conscious of that, perhaps we might start to see how all our conditions determine our forms...”, and the demand becomes a pan-demand—wanting a way of working in which there’s no discrepancy between activism and formal poetry innovation (which is an age-old imperative) by means of embracing disability (which is almost entirely unheard of)."
