From Grief to Forgiveness, an Alchemical Process

An exhibition by Bianca Lucas at UNO Gallery

Saturday August 14 – Sunday September 5th
Opening: 6pm – 9pm
UNO Gallery, 2429 St Claude Ave, New Orleans

From Grief to Forgiveness, an Alchemical Process explores the processes surrounding Bianca Lucas’ making of her first feature, Love Dog. Utilizing the Jungian principles of Alchemical Transmutation, it traces the artistic evolution of the Opus at the core of the exhibition as simultaneous to an archetypal psychic transformation. From Nigredo – the dark matter, the shadow, the grief – through to Rubedo: the Philosopher’s Stone, the Gold, or forgiveness and the individuated Self.

Bianca Lucas has been working with Deltaworkers since 2019, when she took part in the residency program. She is a Polish/Australian filmmaker whose work explores the intersection of fiction and documentary. She is a graduate of the Film.Factory- a three year programme helmed by legendary director Bela Tarr. We’re proud to present the first constellation of film scenes at UNO Gallery. The work features performances by John Dicks and contain photography by Jozefina Gocman-Dicks.

UNO Gallery has invited Deltaworkers to curate an exhibition to continue the contact that has been built up over the last seven years. This iteration at the gallery will be followed by a larger project in 2022.

ANIMAterialities

Sunday June 13th
11am NOLA (CDT) / 6pm A’dam (CEST)
ONLINE: shorturl.at/gqHX5
Zoom MeetingID: 858 4966 1843

How can we be together otherwise? Let us listen with our bodies

With ANIMAterialities Siegmar offers a sound meditation for wandering together into a space where we don’t need to be alone. Let’s acknowledge the complicated grief, which is present in this time. Grief for the dead, grief for the climate, grief for social injustice, grief for anti blackness, grief for a certain idea of future; individual, collective, worldly and planetary grief.

ANIMAterialities invites us to practice giving our bodies as resonant space for each other’s nourishment and regeneration. How to sustain transformative quaking while asking: How can we be together otherwise?

Bring your headphones, a heavy object, a hot water bottle or a blanket

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist, researcher and death doula invested in immersive visceral art practices that accompany processes of transformation.

Red Vaughan Tremmel’s work explores spaces of play and pleasure, as historically significant sites of social struggle. He is a multidisciplinary artist and professor of history & gender and sexuaity studies at Tulane University.

You Don’t Need Nothing

Each writer that joins Deltaworkers in the residency with support from the Dutch Literature Fund gets the possibility to publish a short text, long poem, or expert from one of their novels. During their reading events, we usually hand them out to the audience. But sadly, we didn’t find the moment to share the last three we published with y’all yet due to Covid-19 restrictions. The three publications are by Dean Bowen (DW2019) with GRIS GRIS, Nhung Dam (DW2020) with A Thousand Fathers, and Frank Keizer (DW2020) with Sweet Bad Thing.

As an additional gesture to share what our visual art residents have been working on during the lockdown, we present a fourth publication, You Don’t Need Nothing, (limited edition) with inspired contributions by Artun Alaska Arasli, Carly Rose Bedford, Inas Halabi, Maggie McWilliams, and Siegmar Zacharias.

Mouthways

On Wednesday, June 17th, Carly Rose Bedford will present Mouthways: a 48hr sequence of transmissions from the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin. 
These will be uploaded live via Instagram stories, to join follow Carly Rose and Deltaworkers.

Carly Rose Bedford is a multidisciplinary artist (AU/NL) whose practice consists of performance, sculpture, research and curation. 

[The inner rooms fade to darkness…]

Thursday May 21st, 7pm at Chateau Curioso (641 Caffin Avenue) and online through instagram live: https://www.instagram.com/deltaworkers/
The day after we share the documentation online too.

A reading of the initial bits of a reworked “A Streetcar Named Desire” written from the perspective of the house it takes place in. A monologue that has no escape route. Performed by Xavier Juarez, possibly with live music.

Artun Alaska Arasli (1987, Ankara) is an artist who lives in and works from Amsterdam, NL. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2011, and later attended the Staedelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He was a resident at the Van Eyck Academie in 2019. Arasli has had solo exhibitions at Kantine in Brussels, Rozenstraat in Amsterdam and The Tip in Frankfurt am Main. He regularly curates exhibitions, most recently “Parallax” at Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam and “Porcupine” at Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (both 2019). In 2016 he has written and directed a theater play, The Beauty Commission, that premiered at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
http://www.artunalaska.com/

Xavier studied film at Columbia College Chicago. He has lived in New Orleans for eight years pursuing photography, video and theatre. He is a brilliant actor and director.

SLOW VIOLENCE (Tracing the Invisible)

A film in real time.
A loosely scripted bike ride with stopping points in Holy Cross

To confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible. What happens when we are unsighted, when what extends before us in the space and time that we most deeply inhabit, remains invisible? Through geographic journeys and encounters, the launching of a (online) space becomes a (temporary) form to engage with the present (for the future), and explore how film can bring the unseen out of the shadows.

Inas Halabi, born in 1988, is an artist and filmmaker from Jerusalem, Palestine. Her practice is concerned with how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact that suppressed or overlooked histories have on contemporary life.

Visit www.tracingtheinvisible.film for more information.
Follow Deltaworkers on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/deltaworkers/) and join us for the live event on Thursday the 14th of May at 5pm NOLA time (midnight A’dam).

A Collective Note taking Here and There

Online reading with Deltaworkers resident Frank Keizer, New Orleans writer Skye Jackson, and poet Kelly Harris.

Thursday May 7th, 2020, at 2pm New Orleans / 9pm Amsterdam
Zoom in here

Youtube documentation here

Kelly Harris received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Cave Canem. She recently completed her tenure as guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine at the University of New Orleans.
Her debut poetry collection, Freedom Knows My Name, is set for release next month.

Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds an English degree from LSU and a JD from Mississippi College School of Law. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop where she serves as an Associate Poetry Editor of Bayou Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Delta Literary Journal and Thought Catalog. She was recently a featured author in Rigorous: a journal for people of color and has work forthcoming from the Xavier Review. Her prize-winning chapbook, A Faster Grave, was published in May 2019 by Antenna Press. An interview about the collection is forthcoming in the New Delta Review. In March 2020, she was awarded the Vasser Miller Poetry Prize. She is currently an instructor at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where she teaches poetry to young artists.

Frank Keizer (NL) is a poet, critic and editor. He is the author of Onder normale omstandigheden (Under Normal Circumstances, 2016) and Lief slecht ding (Sweet Bad Thing, 2019). His current writing project Hot Autumn revolves around the crisis of current political, historical, ecological and literary imaginaries, and the urgent need to develop critical languages situated between science, theory and literary writing that respond to this crisis.

Frank Keizers residency is supported by the Dutch Literature Fund

AMBERGREASE

presentation at the oldest indoor pool in town

Kari Robertson presents research conducted and material collected during her three-month residency at Deltaworkers New Orleans.

In Louisiana Kari explores the notion of ‘Aquatic Architecture’ (structures made by, or for water), liquidity and the pre-germ theory of Miasma (when it was believed disease and infection was passed through foul odours and ‘bad vapours’ from the swamp/sea). Kari uses these concepts as a lens to playfully explore conceptions of pollution, proximity and contamination. Her performative presentation will use projection, sound, scent and a swimming pool to re-conceive relationships to other species, environment and each other as volatile and liquid.

Kari (U.K) is a graduate of The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she continues to live and work. For the past several years Kari has been working in time-based media; primarily sound, analogue film, and digital video. Recent works explore aspects of contemporary subjectivity and relationship to environment through humour and absurdity. Kari’s works often start with a theoretical proposition which is then examined and animated through characterisation and narrative.

The event takes place at the oldest indoor pool in the city. Swimsuits are welcome. Bring your own towel.

The artist likes to thank: Deltaworkers residency, Maria Levitsky, Wilma Subra, Lina Moses, Geo Wyeth, santiago Pinyol, Manon Bellet, The Grand Isle Fisheries Research Lab, The North Rampart community Centre, Coach Parker and Ian Voparil.

The Miscegenation Blues, at the Muck Studies Dept.

Muck Studies Dept. performs music and monologues, the articulated findings from their residency in New Orleans and surrounding areas. They search for n.o. stars in the ground to make a way out of no way. The “muck” in Muck Studies pulls from the idea of the Muck Raker, a turn of the century American figure of truth-teller and investigative reporter, intent on exposing the corruption in industry and government.

Muck also refers to the artists’ grappling with identity and place in (black) history — as a white passing black transexual demon, the artist feels completely insane most of the time, and is trying to age out of caring about all this shit but it’s not working. They listen to the muck for n.o. stars as a way to find a language for their own history and the history of the land in connection to capital and the brutalizing political projects of race, class, and gender. They attempt to find healing in the water, but also in the muck under the water, which contains gas (methane) generated from dead plants. Stars are rocks surrounded by gases.

Free and open to the public.
Suggested donations $10. All proceeds go to the black trans femme community of New Orleans.

https://www.gofundme.com/blacktransfemmesofnola

The artist would like to thank: Jay Tan, Brandon King, Nia Umoja, Elijah Williams, Maaike Gouwenberg, Kari Robertson, Maggie McWilliams, Maria Levitsky, Edge, Yamil Rodriguez, Aretha Franklin, the Lower 9th Ward of the city of New Orleans, and the neighborhood of West Jackson, Mississippi for the opportunity to be here and do this work.

A Moment At The Maple Leaf

As part of the longest running literary reading open mic event in the USA (40 years!), Dean Bowen (NL) will be featured reader for this May Sunday.

The Maple Leaf Bar hosts the longest continuously running poetry reading series in North America. It is free and open to the public. The poetry series has been a platform for a great diversity of writers to present their work, from the published and well-established to the novice poet alike. The reading series was founded in 1979 by Franz Heldner, Bob Stock, and the consummate poet laureate of the Maple Leaf Bar, Everette Maddox.

Dean Bowen, currently in residency with Deltaworkers, is a poet, performer and psychonaut. He examines the dynamics of the composite identity and how this relates to a political and social positioning of the self. Bowen questions how he and others relate to the idea of their ‘blackness’ in relation to the diasporic spreading of black bodies over different continents. This ethnic and cultural identity marker has become an international transcontinental dialogue that aims to disrupt the alleged hegemony of the western imperialist narrative. Through his writing he feels connected to this larger conversation.

Presented as part of the Maple Leaf Bar Literary Readings

Thanks to Nancy Harris