notes on april 🌸 free virtual event on 5-14!

Dear friends,

There have been many new subscribers on here, I suppose since the circulation of my Geopoetics class in March. Hello to those people!! <3

This will be a brief post in the frenzy of semester’s end, but I just wanted to share especially about an upcoming hybrid event I’m running with dear friend Aarón Montoya-Moraga, who teaches design in Santiago, Chile. I’m sort of thinking about it as my last hurrah in my current role at the college, since I’m transitioning out after May.

The speakers—Australian/American/Chilean artists and researchers Tega Brain, Everest Pipkin, Claudio Ruiz, Carolina Pino—are amazing, and the event is free!

It’s next Thursday, 11am–1pm EST. Registration for the Zoom link is as follows:

REGISTER FOR ZOOM :)

The poster is by RISD GD BFA ‘26 Marie You.

A few other updates I want to share:

• This beautiful book by Nora + Giancarlo of Cardboard House Press. I was recently at the bookbinding party for it; it’s a documentary project sharing the history of immigrant detention in RI… they frame the project as ephemera “for an impending past,” which I love. All proceeds go to AMOR serving detainees in RI.

• May 15! Come to the If/Then Open Mic on Zoom! Ryan Greene + I will be sharing some “transfluxions,” and some plural/playful/multimodal perspectives and experiments on translation in print, web, and more~

• Tomorrow in Boston! I’m running this “future-making” divination workshop towards our personal and political futures at Design Studio for Social Intervention. We’ll hold some quotes from Octavia Butler, from Skawennati’s Indigenous futurisms, and make a collective tarot deck drawing from how our ancestors coped with hard times, and what we want to leave for our descendants. <3

  
  Some screenshots of tomorrow’s slides to follow, of Skawennati’s cornhusk dolls and avatars.

Her work is so playful (and very y2k…) and I love the way she writes about this piece, which she says “illustrate[s] that timeline I’ve been imagining, one that stretches from the deep past to the far future, with Indigenous people alive and kicking along its entire length.”

April was a whirlwind, here are some dispatches from then…

• I invited Connie Yu of Many Folds Press and MJ Sanqui of Binch Press as part of RISD’s art book fair, Unbound. Koji Hellman designed the posters and followed up with some very thoughtful Q&A. This was a really wonderful and tender event with so many folks (unexpectedly!) from the larger Providence community, coming together to think through what “solidarity publishing” could mean, and to raise funds for AMOR and the Sameer Project. Thank you to Zhu Gao for the photos! <3

Poster by Koji Hellman

• I just finished this great class called Landscape and Empire from Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Thinking a lot about WJT Mitchell’s Landscape and Power, as well as a reading called the Purloined Landscape about transparency, visibility, and surveillance relating to military infrastructure in the American West. I’m hoping to draw some threads from this into my Geopoetics class this summer!

• Finally, I’ve been making plushies of computers… uh, for no reason other than I was compelled to make soft computers…. they use images of product specs screenshotted from eBay, and via NFC tags, they link to new poems I’ve been writing.

In preparation for the divination workshop tomorrow, I’ve been reading about ceromancy (wax), bibliomancy (books), and also the complex divvying of yarrow stalks that’s done for consulting the I-Ching.

You can buy yarrow on Amazon, filed under “Misc Supplies,” which comes with an element of cursedness to it. The I-Ching does promote yarrow to be as local as possible, to be most powerful and in sync with your energy…

In my dream last night, there were profuse bouquets of yarrow, and I was cutting and counting stalks to get to 50. Trying not to take too much, trying not to be greedy. Yarrow, at least now in RI, isn’t yet flowering, and I am waiting for my time in the waking world. Something there about abundance, about future-making, about patience.

For now, the cherries are almost done blooming profusely, I am saving their petals to make a jar full of spells <3

‘Til the next dispatch, and ‘til the yarrow here shoots up and flowers—

kw