Missing/ Missed: An Arts and Advocacy Event
Inspired by the journalism of Erika Marie Rivers, Our Black Girls, and Derrica and Natalie Wilson, producers of the HBO docuseries Black and Missing, Missed is a piece of participatory action research dedicated to the countless women (and their families) who go missing each year. Police reports reduce the missing person to “the last thing she was seen wearing”; somehow, in the moment of going missing, the person becomes a stereotype, label, profile that can be stapled on telephone poles: absent and obsolete. According to the National Crime Information Center, 268,884 women are reported missing each year. We turn to social media and popular culture to see which stories receive airtime, exposure, and thus, attention, and which faces do not.
Please, join us on November 3rd at the McAuley Heritage Center on the Georgian Court University campus to participate in this project. The event is drop-on (between 1-4 PM). There will be tables set up with information on the issue, a place to make personal care kits for women residing in our partner The Providence House, a table to process and compose art (art as healing; art as advocacy; art as collective witness), and a bake sale fundraiser.
The art project will include applying redaction to missing ads and newspaper articles to create a series of erasure poems—to find the person missing from the text and make visible the person behind the text. In this excavation of voices, writers play the role of grief doula and critical witness, but, also, peace medium and generous listener. The limits of the work are unbearable: not being able to bring the body of the person back. The reach of the work offers promise: how can we bring the essence of a person home?
Consider bringing an item from the Providence House Wishlist to donate.
Contact Kristen Park Wedlock, Vickie Smith, or Nicolette Palazzo with questions or comments.
Organizations Working Hard to Locate Missing Persons AND Dignify Missing Person Cases
HBOMAX Missing and Black Documentary: https://youtu.be/LwUX0il8MwQ
Here are some of the research questions and practices that went into designing my art installation Water Lies for the Fall 2021 Faculty Art Show at Georgian Court University, curated by Dr. Marci Mazzarotto. The show will open on September 2nd Please, stay tuned for pictures from the show.
Water Lies
By Kristen Park Wedlock, B.S., M.F.A.
Assistant Professor of Writing
I turn to water to understand language; I turn to language to understand water. Both language and water carry, cover, break, retreat, carve, divide, heal, poison, drain, saturate, dilute, fill, and move. We construct our civilizations beside them and through them and with them—by the sea we wade and wage and sail and sell. By sampling and testing water we can understand what properties, trace, and accumulations mark the line—how can the health of an ecosystem be determined by an investigation of watershed? By sampling and testing language (text) we can understand which values, attitudes, and beliefs of a culture construct the line—how can the health of a society be determined by an investigation of its representations? What happens to truth in water and oxygen in language and how does the container shape the message? How do words like pollution, purity, contamination, dilution, saturation, emersion, transparency, translucency, opacity, conservation, scarcity, and thirst emerge as critical vectors in transdisciplinary conversations on the environment, economics, race, gender, health, and globalization?
This installation takes excerpts from the manuscript Water Lies and contains these prose blocks in glass, water, and iron to observe what happens to the readability of the text. How is the message erased, revealed, saturated, diluted, amplified, broken, held, and carried? When witnessed—handled and seen and heard—what happens to the language in the water and the language of water (Masaru Emoto)? Water Lies explores the narratives of three faceless, nameless service workers and what happens to their stories when replicated, spliced, inserted, and transmuted. How do their cells and selves divide, accumulate, resist, and transform?
As a reader, how willing are you to sit with the same story over and over and over until [ ]? At what point do you reach saturation? Does the message become diluted? Do you notice the small shifts—mutations in the language—that indicate time passing in gestures like waves? How do these often silenced voices sound when carried across water (a yell) versus submerged in water (a moan)? What happens to suffering when soaked in salt water—to wound and wear and wait?
I offer this installation as a space for witnessing. When you shake, rake, sway, settle, and read the narratives of these three women you make them visible pouring glasses, taking temperatures, and cleaning produce. So, please, take this invitation to play.
An Invitation to Play: Please, Touch My Art
Writing in water is a matter of displacement—KPW
1, 2, 3, 7 SWAY & SETTLE.
Grab a glass box filled with blue water. Swish, sway, and swirl as you like. How do the waves swell and crest and curl and what lines do they reveal and obscure in their movement? In the gesture of the wave, how does the shore rewrite the line?
Lest we forget the moon moves the sea—MJW
4, 5, 6, 8 SHAKE & RAKE
Grab a glass box filled with magnetic filings. Shake until the water is cloudy—inky black. Take one of the magnet wands and glide it over the glass. Which words are erased and which are restored? If words have a charge, then how can we use the filings to deconstruct polarity in speech and binaries in language? What container is bigger than any single duality and how can water teach us to practice nondualism, impermanence, and uncertainty? When all is filed what savings will come of our record (read:: discord, read:: accord)?
9 SIT & WRITE
What thoughts, feelings, sensations arrive in you as you sit? What words linger? Which words can you let go of? What is your story to tell and in which medium—which container—does it arrive to you?
Thank you for playing!
Chapbooks for Change Project
Bryant University - May 2017.
The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living – Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation.”
Chapbooks for Change invites student writers to examine intersectionality and intertextuality through research, writing, and publishing: words matter, how can words hold the space for change?
In the 17th and 18th centuries, chapbooks were paper leaflets distributed to share everything from children’s stories and folk tales to political or religious views. They delivered “information” to the masses – a transmitter of “popular” culture for the populous. They created public spaces on the page. Today, chapbooks are the “demo-tapes” or “first collections” of the poetry world – an introduction, extended, held, passed. In a time of “alternative” facts, hash tags, and paid “fake” news, this project uses the chapbook to hold a space for contemplation, remediation, and investigation. It creates a pocket of time to turn over – paper-page-hand-word – an invitation to sit with and sift through.
Using the principles of gift economy, guerilla distribution, and eco-linguistics, writers have positioned copies of their chapbooks throughout the Bryant University Library. This tactic is a response to the current conversation on borders, boundaries, migration, and immigration – how does the undocumented document move through/in/of/with? What role does intertextuality play in the finding and reading of the text? Coordinates are created at the intersection of the critical and the creative, the poetic and the political; a reorientation is possible. Each chapbook has a QR code so that readers can “check in” or rather “check out” the text. The reader is then encouraged to find a new public space for the chapbook: another place in the library, another library, a bench, a bus, a . Readers will be able to track the travel – to see the trace – to watch the language, the information move. Comments welcome.
harvest songs fall poetry festival.
Springfield, IL. September 2014.
Held at the beautiful Lincoln Memorial Gardens and co-sponsored by Benedictine University at Springfield, Harvest Songs was a celebration of the season and an opportunity for reflection on Autumn's warmth and bounty. Attendees variously tied original or favorite song lyrics to the "Poet-tree," penned gourd-inspired haikus, wrote one-word sensory descriptions about the tastes, sounds, and smells of Fall, and wove biodegradable strips of paper and yarn into a handmade loom that was later installed in the gardens for the birds to scavenge for their winter nests.
littoral: restore the shore one breath at a time.
Bay Head, NJ. June 2013.
Littoral combined an all-levels beach yoga practice and community poetry reading in the wake of Superstorm Sandy to negotiate a healing dialogue between body (yoga), earth (ritual), and word (poetry). Jersey Shore residents no longer live at the edge of the sea, but are themselves the space between land and water: the threshold of the body. In this indefinable place, one lives between breaths; between storms; between waves; cultivating an acceptance of impermanence to build a sustainable relationship with the land. Behold the "hardy and adaptable" creatures of the littoral zone. For more on this event, click here.
sunshine canyon reading.
Boulder, CO. October 2012.
Community creativity can heal both physical and mental injury, by connecting us to those parts of the earth to which we press our feet: a meeting in the middle of the scar. The Sunshine Canyon Reading responded to the trauma of a severe forest fire that devastated not only the canyon, but its human and animal inhabitants. Featuring indigenous land rights activists and guest poets Marcelo Games, Burt Rashbaum, Mary Parker, Jenna Kotch, Ariella Ruth, Cody Spyker, Andrea Bogue, and April Joseph, in addition to work from Precipice members Kristen Park and Jess Hagemann and an eco-somatic exercise led by Jade Lascelles, the ceremony inspired word, ritual, and healing for all.
Photo by Chris Baddick.
stone cold poetry fun run.
Boulder, CO. February 2012.
The Precipice Collective's first event, the Stone Cold Poetry Fun Run, traced a 2-mile route through chilly downtown Boulder. With stops at several key landmarks on Pearl Street and the surrounding area for poetry readings and spontaneous poetry "happenings," both participants and passersby contributed individual lines to a community poem in the making.
Watch the Trailer for Black and Missing HBO Documentary: https://youtu.be/LwUX0il8MwQ