A Grammar Built with Rocks
A Grammar Built with Rocks / Black Bach Artsakh
Thursday, January 29
Doors: 7pm
Event: 7:30pm
at 2220 Arts + Archives
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The Poetic Research Bureau and Wendy’s Subway present a book launch for A Grammar Built with Rocks, edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian. The evening will include readings, a film screening of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri’s Black Bach Artsakh, and a discussion with filmmaker Gabri and writer and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.
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Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationships between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagements with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis. The publication highlights how creative research methodologies can function as radically new place-making practices. Bringing together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions, the book examines how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.
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Screening
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Black Bach Artsakh (2021, 150 minutes)
Black Bach Artsakh is a filmic construction based on interviews with inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh conducted in 2007, during a period between two wars. As in their earlier works shown in Forum Expanded, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work with multiple layers of time. Whereas earlier projects involved live editing and presentation, here they use temporal distance to re-evaluate archival footage.
Harking back to the engagements of Straub/Huillet and Pier Paolo Pasolini with the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, the filmmakers experiment with the possible effects of his music.
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Ayreen Anastas, a body in search of gestures, words, phrases, sentences to disactivate and destitute the impositions, forms, including the form of biography this form of self, to bring about some forces which give potency to life to bodies with and around them. How to not separate one ‘self?’ from a common that helps shape life and gives it intensity and meaning. How to become unintelligible, incomprehensible, opaque to the fabricated machines of subjectivation and self-making. How to write in a language that only friends-to-come receive, a language that wrestles with language to keep the relations to all the palestines and to their forms of life alive.
Rene Gabri is another name for that process of recovering stolen life. The name is not gendered, though it has engendered enough confusion to assign to it all sorts of pronouns and prescriptions. It is a non-native name calling forth a native life, a life constantly pushed to the margins of oblivion. It recalls sites of previous and ongoing battles. It remains steadfastly associated with the wind, which is the closest kin or resembling a homeland. In this searching, a question which re-emerges: is wind origin, destiny or the unforeseen push toward a dissemination of the seeds of whatever could become recovery.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is a writer, artist, and an Associate Professor at ArtCenter College of Design. She is a Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, and a 2024-25 Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge Visual Culture. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022). Her performances and projects have been presented at REDCAT, Music Center LA, the 2024 Asian Art Biennial, and Centre Pompidou. Her writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Los Angeles Review of Books, AI & Society, and elsewhere.