Join us tonight at 5:30 p.m. EDT for an in-person and livestreamed celebration of Elvia Wilk's new book, Death by Landscape. The evening will include a conversation with Alexandra Kleeman and a screening of Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer's short film Nosferasta: First Bite (2021).
Read more and RSVP: https://bit.ly/3QYUBH4
Please note that the livestream will pause for about thirty minutes during the screening of Khalil and Sweitzer's film. (Due to the nature of YouTube Live, we cannot license the film for the livestream.)
Watch documentation of a conversation between Zakaria Almoutlak, Karthik Pandian, Andros Zins-Browne, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Evan Calder Williams. They considered how lives and histories are defined and reconfigured in the creation, circulation, destruction, and reconstruction of monuments, especially given the recent efforts to dismantle those honoring agents of colonialism and slavery. https://bit.ly/3szdcPb
“Four Songs without Z,” published in our new issue, is a suite of songs that is part of a years-long collaboration between the artists Karthik Pandian, Andros Zins-Browne, and Zakaria Almoutlak—a sculptor from Homs who joined the Syrian revolution in 2011 and later fled to Belgium, where he now lives—that renders Almoutlak’s experience through sculpture and vocal performance. The singers, Ganavya Doraiswamy and Aliana de la Guardia, improvise as they move between lyrics, weaving fragments of Almoutlak's life together, migrating his stories into melodies from a range of popular, folk, and classical genres.
https://bit.ly/3pPrMkp
🎥: Excerpt from “Actor,” one of the songs included in “Four Songs without Z.”
Excerpt from Untitled by Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Light Shows—a program we presented with Wendy's Subway to celebrate two recent publications by Benjamin Krusling—is streaming on our website. Krusling created a video that incorporated excerpts from his debut book of poems, Glaring (Wendy’s Subway, 2020), and his digital series of poems, “i have too much to hide” (Triple Canopy, 2021), as well as new work. Asiya Wadud and S*an D. Henry-Smith contributed videos that feature readings of poetry, and Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste created new video and sound works.
https://bit.ly/363E2os
🎥: Excerpt from Untitled by Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Read "Listening" by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
We've just published Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's "Listening," a poem on perception (and an exaltation of the senses), as part of our latest issue. https://bit.ly/2XbLrh7
“The notion of diasporas taking shape online and touching down in Honduras or Taiwan might seem far-fetched. But COVID-19 is accelerating the shift toward remote work and is likely to expand the number of people who can think flexibly about where they live. And the virus has inflicted on the world a concentrated experiment in comparative governance, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of each jurisdiction and political system. How will cities and nation-states respond if more and more people can change where they live?”
Read “On the Next Economy,” Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s contribution to #PartsofSpeech, published in collaboration with Public Fiction. The work is a fairytale about the origins and eventual demise of nations, and the role of technology in transforming conceptions of home, work, and governance, punctuated by a series of “video polemics” made in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann . “On the Next Economy” also acts as a manifesto for the Berlin-based R&D studio New Eelam, which is developing a co-op-esque housing network that will enable members to freely access homes in multiple cities. (Kulendran Thomas, an artist and entrepreneur, is part of the Tamil diaspora; he named New Eelam after a term that translates as “home” but also refers to the historic Tamil homeland in what is now Sri Lanka.)
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-the-next-economy
“Over time, the evolution of the species through technologies for transportation, logistics, and communication enabled more and more humans to make the whole world home. Then a devastating plague descended, threatening hundreds of millions of lives. Rulers had always been charged with protecting their citizens, whether from barbarians or natural disasters. But this plague threatened people around the world, at the same time. Each ruler of each nation was tested simultaneously. And, thanks to new communication technologies, people everywhere saw which nations, governments, and political systems really could protect them and which couldn’t.”
Experience “On the Next Economy,” by Christopher Kulendran Thomas: a fairytale about nation-states, migration, and technological upheaval, punctuated by a series of “video polemics” made in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-the-next-economy
“As more and more jobs are automated, the future of work looks increasingly like what artists do: move from project to project, from city to city, tethered to a laptop rather than an office or factory. Perhaps, then, the home, rather than the office or factory, is becoming the primary site and means of production—and of the transformation of the economy beyond waged labor. Which raises the question: how could the home be reorganized through collective ownership?”
Read “On the Next Economy,” Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s contribution to #PartsofSpeech, published in collaboration with Public Fiction. His fairy tale and series of “video polemics,” made in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, questions the origins and future of nations and homelands. The project is also a manifesto for the Berlin-based R&D studio New Eelam, which is developing a co-op-esque housing network that will enable members to freely access homes in multiple cities.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-the-next-economy
COVID-19 is testing the competence of governments, testing the ability of nations to protect their citizens. And if they fail, citizens might leave for more capable, equitable states—or look for something else entirely, something other than states.
For #PartsofSpeech, Christopher Kulendran Thomas envisions a world after the pandemic in which citizenship is untethered from borders, networks replace nations, and streamable homes are inhabited by “reverse diasporas.” His contribution, “On the Next Economy,” is a fairy tale about an ancient civilization, technological upheaval, and the unraveling of nation-states. The work is punctuated by a series of “video polemics” made in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, and accompanied by a conversation with Glen Weyl, the coauthor of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society and founder of Radical Exchange.
“On the Next Economy” is adapted from a speech of the same name delivered on May 21, 2019, as a contribution to “Parts of Speech,” an exhibition organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-the-next-economy
On Labor and Management by Julio Torres
“When you see a hog, you see a garbage disposal; when you see a little bird, you see … whatever he wants to be.”
In “On Labor and Management,” the comedian and writer Julio Torres gives voice to Maurice—the hog that lives under the sink in the Flintstones’ bedrock house—who works day and night as a garbage disposal for the family’s waste. He petitions the boss (Wilma Flintstone) for a promotion, only to realize that his dead-end job is destiny.
The publication consists of a video of the speech with an animation by Lucy Jones, commissioned for the occasion, as well as the script.
“On Labor and Management” is adapted from a speech of the same name, which Torres delivered on May 24, 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as a contribution to Parts of Speech, an exhibition at the museum organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction. Visit the link in our profile to view the project in full.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-labor-and-management
On Onomatopoeia by Tomeka Reid
“This music, at the core, proves that being an individual and being a collective aren’t at odds. It proves that creative human expression and creative humanistic exchange can happen for reasons other than profit and wealth. It proves that we all are better as human beings than we are told we are. And that’s a dangerous notion; it’s one we have to fight for.”
For Parts of Speech, the cellist and composer Tomeka Reid improvises music and words with Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Mike Reed (drums), and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu (vocals), who reflect on audiences of accountants and doctors, improvisation as speech and resistance, and “great Black music” after Armageddon.
The publication consists of a video documenting the performance and an edited transcript of the conversation.
“On Onomatopoeia” is adapted from a performance of the same name, which occurred on May 17, 2019, at Rebuild Foundation's Stony Island Arts Bank, as a contribution to “Parts of Speech,” an exhibition organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-onomatopoeia
On Similitude by Steffani Jemison with Garrett Gray
“A friend of mine who performs as a mime reminded me that, as a form of public speech, pantomime evolved similarly across cultures because the problems to be solved are fundamental. How do you amplify messages across distances too vast to be traversed by speech? How do you extend speech beyond the sound of the voice?”
In a performance and lecture, the artist Steffani Jemison and the mime Garrett Gray ask how, without language, we speak and are heard; how we know and are known by the world; and how information passes from body to body to body to body.
The publication consists of the script of the initial lecture, video documentation of Jemison and Gray’s rehearsals, and a new series of drawings by Jemison.
“On Similitude” is adapted from a performance of the same name, which occurred on April 26, 2019, at Chicago’s South Shore Cultural Center, as a contribution to “Parts of Speech,” an exhibition organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-similitude
On What We Owe by Astra Taylor with Laura Hanna
As the saying goes: If you owe the bank one hundred dollars, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank one hundred million dollars, you own the bank.
On February 15, 2019, Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna convened an assembly of the indebted at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. Participants shared accounts of predatory lenders and machinic collectors, of being shamed and isolated. And, together, they asked how to make themselves heard above the speech bought by creditors. As Hanna asserted during the convening: “We can’t pay—and, at a certain point, we’re going to need to say, ‘We’re not going to pay.’”
Organized under the auspices of the Debt Collective, a membership organization that has cancelled hundreds of millions of dollars in medical and student debt, the assembly aimed to change the way debt is understood and debtors are treated. The publication consists of a video with excerpts of the assembly and a conversation between the organizers and Triple Canopy senior editor Maya Binyam.
“On What We Owe” is adapted from a speech of the same name, as a contribution to Parts of Speech, an exhibition organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-what-we-owe
On the Difficulties in Writing the Truth by Hari Kunzru
“When all the talk is of who is a real American, it takes courage to ask: who is unreal?”
For Parts of Speech, Hari Kunzru, a novelist and critic, details how to write the truth under fascism, as uniformed brutes round up dissenters and politicians insist on an alternative reality. Kunzru rewrites Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 essay “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth,” and relates the emergence of twentieth-century fascism to the situation in today’s so-called democracies. Kunzru offers antidotes to the distractions, distortions, misinformation, and harassment campaigns that hamper our capacity to speak—and spread and weaponize—the truth. And he identifies those who decry barbarism and risk nothing, those who merely crave “the status of being a truth teller.”
The publication of “On the Difficulties in Writing the Truth” consists of an essay and a video that represents—or misrepresents—a speech of the same name. Kunzru’s speech was delivered on March 12, 2019, at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre as a contribution to “Parts of Speech,” an exhibition organized by Triple Canopy and Public Fiction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/26/contents/i26-on-the-difficulties-in-writing-the-truth
Trailer for Triple Canopy’s If the Limbs Grow Too Large for the Body, 2019.
How do artworks and decor—as well as fictions and fashions—give rise to nations and nationalities? What do they tell viewers about how to look and act, what and whom to value? How has the United States been shaped through the consumption and display of such goods, as well as the subjugation of the people whose labor or likenesses mark them?
For “Raid the Icebox Now,” an exhibition at the RISD Museum, Triple Canopy created Can I Leave You?, a multimedia installation that considers the role of early American decorative arts in the formation of a common identity. Triple Canopy also commissioned a capsule collection and campaign video by the collective and fashion label CFGNY, which are included in the installation.
Can I Leave You? centers on the efforts of Americans to define themselves through products and portrayals of China, whether via porcelain bowls or travelogues, whether out of admiration or animus. The installation is divided between the Museum’s Pendleton House and a nearby gallery. Multiple works are linked by an epistolary narrative that scrutinizes facile fictions of China and Chinese people from the Colonial era to the present, as well as expressions of dissonance and harmony in early American rituals and music.
Now on view at the RISD Museum through July 19, 2020.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/series/can-i-leave-you/contents/can-i-leave-you-at-the-r-i-s-d-museum
The conclusion of issue 25, Resentment
We’ve just closed issue 25, Resentment, our issue devoted to reclaiming resentment, especially as harbored by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being called unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological. Read (or revisit) essays, poems, conversations, readings, digital artworks, and recordings by Goldin+Senneby & Lina Ekdahl, Saretta Morgan, mouthfeel (S*an D. Henry-Smith & Imani Elizabeth Jackson), The New Red Order, Aki Sasamoto, and Wendy Xu, among others.
https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/the-conclusion-of-issue-25-resentment
Triple Canopy Benefit After-Party, with Riobamba and Donis
Calling all disciples of the dance floor: Our 2019 benefit after-party is only one week away! Dance with us at Jing Fong Restaurant on Tuesday, November 12 from 9:30pm-1am. DJ sets by RIOBAMBA_dj & Donis. Entry is free 💥
Photo of Riobamba by Guarionex Rodriguez, Jr. Photo of Donis by RAVERBABA.
More information here: https://bit.ly/2oQMx4b
On Resentment: A Film Series
Tonight, at 6:45PM, we’re showing Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled.” It’s the last night of On Resentment, a series of films on identity and representation, violence and ownership, revolutions and dead ends, presented with BAM!
