Image Description: Looking over the shoulder of a violinist at a wall where a texts if projects and covered in green painting marks.
FOUND POETRY WORKSHOP ERASURE
2018 // ART LETTERS & NUMBERS // AVERIL PARK [NY, USA]
Working from a joint text projected to a large piece of paper, the participants erased the words by calling them out as they painted over them. The simple action started out with horizontal lines but quickly moved into more expressive gestures, and even to painting over words projected to the moving bodies. When it came to a stop, the participants created poems from the works left untouched by the paint.
During the presentation of the poems, multiple participants with musical backgrounds would use the resulting painting as their score, either while also reading their own poem, or collaborating with other participants and playing along to their poems.
After the workshop, I collected all the original poems into a unique artist book, which was read by the participants at the Arts Letters & Numbers festival.
This was the first found poetry workshop in a series of three:
01 [ Found Poetry Collection ]
02 [ Found Poetry Memory Objects ]
Image Description: Photo of a poem in a square frame, projected on a large sheet of paper, covered in green paint marks.
Image Description: A line of people waiting to get up to a poem projected onto a large sheet of paper on the wall, where they will paint over words with green paint. In this photo there is also a person is painting over words on the arm of another person.
Image Description: Two photos side by side, the left side: frontal view of a projected poem on a large sheet of paper, where three people are painting over words, one person standing on a chair. The right side is looking along the wall, seeing how other people are painting over the words, and framing the space between the bodies and the poems, showing also the interaction of the shadows on the poem.
Image Description: View of the room, with people sitting scattered around the projection of the poem, mostly painted over by green marks. The people are writing in individual note books.
Image Description: Triptych of a publication, the first photo shows a gray cover with a small square hole in the center where part of the poem with green marks can be seen, and the bottom right has a Chicago screw holding the pages together. Second has the papers halfway out of the cover, and the third fully out, showing the print of the poem on the cover page. The publication holds the poems the participants wrote and is a 1 of 1.
Image Description: Photo of the fanned-out pages of the publication. The left side shows the full poems in digital print, the left side a handwritten poem, reading: spread their / city / the city / city / from / looking up / run / lips / the room pushes / wordless / hand in hand / in / these / cold have / but / 7.496 / had / to collect