Reading with Rindon Johnson and Precious Okoyomon
Our associate Rindon Johnson and Precious Okoyomon hold a Reading at KW in Berlin.
In her 1994 essay Purity, Impurity, and Separation, María Lugones, working in a hybrid mestizaje tradition, addresses the idea of curdling, which she calls an “exercise in impurity”. According to the logic of curdling, she writes, “the social world is complex and heterogenous and each person is multiple, non-fragmented, embodied.” In her vision, communities of creative, border-dwelling consciousnesses can resist the hetero-relational world order. Curdling, as a literary metaphor, describes language that is unclassifiable, and unmanageable.
The poetry of Precious Okoyomon and Rindon Johnson takes multiplicity, fragmentation, and embodiment as foundational conditions. Pursuing a lyrical mode, each poet destabilizes the authority of the speaking voice, while subverting prescribed understandings of race, gender and technology. For the reading at KW, both have been invited to respond to the notion of curdling as a prompt and as a departure point for a poetics that operates in the ambiguous zones of between, within, and beyond.
When? Where?
12 July 2019, 7pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
KW Studio, Vorderhaus, 1st floor
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin