Sound Poesie From a Book — Vava Dudu

Vava Dudu: Sound Poesie From a Book

Response-able Re-membering

The hyphenation to shift the stress of response-able in The Faggots & Their Friends…* was a big deal for me. This afternoon is linked to a reading group where we’ve been looking at various texts, pictures, and drawings as bodily extensions that shift the stresses. Writers and artists that take familiar architectures, (arbitrary) rules, garments, and objects to demonstrate how malleable and expansive our surroundings already are. Making astute social observations, framing beauty, and re-claiming histories, so we re-member (all the parts of) ourselves. Let’s cite historic resource controls and exploitations as amongst the reasons why we would need to write and make pictures to re-member. Economic pushes, educational pulls. Oceans, lies, thefts, and then to top it all off being gawped at. The load redistributes and the aunties and our other families laugh so much, and slap our backs, and push us back out there into more stories. Noisy recipes full of those unspeakable things, teary squishy embraces, jewellery, and fabrics. We re-member how (many) we are and how (many) we have been.

Please join us in welcoming Alberto García del Castillo, Vava Dudu, and Bishakh Som to share their thoughts, pictures, and work.

*The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions is a 1977 ‘fairytale-cum-manifesto’ (Jennifer Krasinski) written by Larry Mitchell, with illustrations by Ned Asta. The 2019 reissue features a preface by Tourmaline in which she describes how resonant the passage about being response-able was for her.