Our vision and desire is for you to find someone--
maybe someone you don't know that well, maybe someone
you didn't come to this evening with.
I can use this and I don't have to yell.
So find someone else to talk to.
If you're comfortable finding someone you don't know,
find that person.
If you prefer to talk to someone you know, do what you prefer.
And think about a moment in your life
when you very deeply felt the power of language.
There's no positive or negative, no judgment around that.
It could be a moment of great joy.
It could be a moment of great alienation.
It could be totally neutral.
It could be something completely in between.
But a moment when you felt how powerful language is.
So take a moment right now to think about that.
Take a moment right now to find someone else to talk with.
We will time you.
Each person has a minute and a half to share their story.
When you are the story sharer, tell your story
in whatever way you prefer to tell it.
When you are the listener, you only listen.
You're not-- I mean, you might nod
you might have an expression on your face,
but you're not interjecting, you're not saying like,
Oh, yeah, that happened to me too!
Or like, oh, I hate when that happens.
Just listen.
Just take it in.
And your task, when you're the listener,
is to think of, or be ready to jot down or remember a phrase
or word--
truly one word or phrase, you're not
going to retell the person's whole story.
One word or tiny phrase that impacted you
from what you heard.
And then we're going to share those
and we're going to create a collective poem
experience invoking the power of language for us.
Are there any questions about these instructions?
All right.
Go.
One minute and a half.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Switch.
--and they can repeat that word--
So it'll kind of be the--
OK.
Will you explain what we do are do you want me to explain?
[INAUDIBLE]
OK.
That was three minutes.
If you can hear me, put your hands on your head.
If you can hear me, hold your ear.
If you can hear me, touch your stomach.
We went to an elementary school--
this is not on I don't think.
We went to an elementary school today
and we learned that from the elementary school teachers
and from the [INAUDIBLE].
I think you did that first.
Yeah.
You did.
I also just want to say that it's only
been like five minutes into the reading
and already my mic is turned off.
It's like, no more, Jen.
I got it.
Is it on?
It's on but it's not happening.
Hi.
Yeah.
OK.
So we're going to do a bit of an experiment
now with those words.
Does everyone know their one word or their one phrase,
one phrase?
OK.
So we're going to take a minute.
And in that minute we're going to ask you to say your words.
Not all at the same time, we have a whole minute.
So you finish [INAUDIBLE] at different points you can--
And you know what?
--in different ways.
If it's really good, I'm going to convince him
to give us a minute and a half.
So make it count.
Time is very flexible.
It's a flexible thing.
So, so we're gonna, we're going to-- do people understand?
You don't have to just say it once,
you can say multiple times.
You can whisper it.
You can do it as the spirit moves you.
I'm from Houston, the city where Pauline Oliveros is from.
The school of deep listening.
So be listening to the space, be listening
to the people around you.
And then in tone, as it feels right.
Perhaps, it creates a dialogue with words
that other people are saying.
It's a kind of poem that we're going to sing through.
[INAUDIBLE] Everybody?
All right.
Go.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Radio.
Sunrise.
Louder.
Sunrise.
Honor thy mother.
Mother tongue.
[INTERPOSING VOICES] journal.
[INTERPOSTING VOICES]
Looking in the [INTERPOSING VOICES]
I've always loved stories.
Sunrise.
[INTERPOSTING VOICES]
--at the table.
Asking questions.
Yeah, I'm just going to have to do with my hand.
Oh, awesome.
Should I describe this for a moment?
With a mic.
All right.
You know, I was asking you without a mic.
Right.
I was asking you without the mic.
Congratulations.
Thank you all for being willing to do that experiment.
Yes, it's really beautiful.
JP and I spent a little bit of time a number of months
ago in an attempt to diagram the practices of ANTENA, which
is in the process of changing its name,
so I'm going to say its other name out
loud so that you will all know it, which is ANTENA Aire.
Because we work with two sister collectives that
are located in very specific spaces,
ANTENA Houston and ANTENA Los Angeles,
which you might surmise are in Houston and Los Angeles.
And ANTENA, which started before those collectives,
is, we're thinking of ANTENA Aire because it
is both purposeless and permeating,
and a kind of breath that gives life
to us and to lots of projects.
So I'm going to speak those words aloud.
So we used this wheel chart paper
to describe the different areas of our practice.
We're going to take about five minutes to really quickly touch
on some of the central projects we do.
You will be seeing images move through that
may or may not connect to what we're
saying at a particular moment.
But these are all images from the past eight years
of ANTENA Aire's practices.
Do you want to talk a little bit on that?
Sure, yeah, so this idea of the local collectives,
both in Houston and in Los Angeles,
is really the kind of ground upon which
all of this aesthetic work that we're doing in ANTENA Aire.
That's kind of where it's based.
And so, so much of the work that we've done
has been about what kinds of knowledge
are produced in the bodies of interpreters and translators.
And specifically rooted in the bodice
and in the experiences of folks who
are doing interpreting or translating,
as a means of survival, too, right.
So interpreting for parents, interpreting
in government spaces, interpreting in spaces
where there are no interpreters.
And so, so much of that practice is grounded in that.
So without that work that the local collectives do,
which we have leadership five folks
in each city that aren't here today
because this is ANTENA Aire.
So we're finding new ways that the vehicle that
is ANTENA, or the ANTENAs, has continued
to shift into change as the work progresses.
In the work that we do, the phrase
that we use to frame that work is language justice,
which some of you may have heard of,
which includes the basic right that everyone
has to communicate, to understand, and to be
understood in the language or languages in which we
feel most comfortable.
So it's a set of concepts and practices
that help us to create spaces where no language will dominate
over other languages.
So it's a radical approach to listening,
the idea that there is something happening in a language other
than the dominant language, that we need to hear in order
to be able to create the world that we need to live in,
and that we want to live in.
So a lot of the work that we do in our local collectives,
ANTENA Los Angeles and ANTENA Houston,
is working with grassroots, community
based groups and nonprofits.
Once in a while, even with municipal institutions
or educational institutions, who are organizing
across language difference.
And so that cross language practice of thinking about what
kind of hearing do we need to enact,
and how does that manifest in our bodies , as JP was saying.
When we're thinking in a cross language way,
that influences the aesthetic practice
that ANTENA Aire does, which ranges
from installations, where--
that is an installation.
Look at that.
It actually worked.-- installations where we often
showcase small and tiny, press, literary projects
in the United States and all across Latin America.
We're thinking about the labor of love.
That is what we think of as small and tiny press
practices, many of which you can see right across the paseo here
in the Poetry Center.
What else do we do?
DIY book making has been a part from the very beginning.
So these manifestos, which we make ourselves,
and other cartonera books, which are books
made out of cardboard that are also on the table.
So not waiting for a kind of gatekeeper
to come along and say that the work that we're doing
is valuable, but rather starting to put it out there
into the world, and letting that work grow,
and take on its own life.
Because it can have a life of its own in these small forms.
And then it continues to kind of shift and grow
as the years go on.
Our imprint is called Libros Antena Books.
We also collaborate with Ugly Duckling Presse on a series
called The Señal Chapbook series,
which brings Latin American literature,
from all across Latin America and the Caribbean,
from Spanish and Portuguese into English.
Also trying to be in overt effort
to support emerging translators.
So if you are a person who is starting your translation
practice, please come and talk to us afterwards.
We'd be excited to support you.
We also organize cross language aesthetic events, or art
events, sometimes through the small press publishing
that we do.
So for example the cartonera book that we have,
the cardboard press book, which there
are over 100 cartonera presses across Latin America
and a couple in the United States.
You should check them out, they're amazing.
That was in collaboration with the cartonera press called,
Cartonera Santanera from Santa Ana, California.
Caya Press, Tiny Splendor, Kodama Cartonera from Tijuana
took place at a museum in Los Angeles.
The only rule for our curatorial team
for inclusion of works in the book
was no English only poetry.
So we're also working to encourage
folks to write across language, to think
about their ancestral languages or the languages
that we might only speak at home,
and think about how those can manifest in the world.
And how we can use our cross language perspective
to undermine the idea that also the most important aesthetic
practices are only happening in English, because in fact,
they're not.
In a bunch of these pictures you've
seen images of the Antena Mobile, which
is our mobile unit.
I'm going to see if I can come up with one of those.
It's a bright red, Mexican cargo--
Yellow.
I mean I'm colorblind, but I think it's yellow.
I'm the colorblind one in this collaboration.
We learned the word for red in Yaqui today
from a second grader.
It was amazing.
Really cool.
Maybe that's why I've got red on the mind.
And so, this cargo check that some of you have seen
is from Houston.
It's from the East End, which is the neighborhood
that my family's from.
And we purchased it, and then reconditioned it
with the help of designers and artists
to turn it into this mobile bookmobile.
You got it.
Yeah.
I was going to find it for you.
I mean it's coming.
Yeah, que mas?
I don't know, let's look at our notes.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah, there's the mobile unit.
Yeah, so we populate it-- we curate it
in different ways for different spaces,
but most often we curate it with an eye toward small press
publications in the US that focus on innovative writing
by writers of color, queer and gender queer writers,
and women identified writers, work
in translation from all over the world into English,
and experimental writing in Spanish
from small independent presses across Latin America.
We also do bookmaking workshops.
This is at Grand Central Art Center, also in Santa Ana.
And we've done a number of publishing projects linked
to the Antena Mobile.
It's also rideable.
So if you come to LA and you want to ride it, hit me up.
We do collaborative writing as you
might have noticed from us reading
from one of our projects.
Should we wrap up?
I think so.
Yeah.
We also we each have our own writing and translation
practice, but when we encounter a particularly challenging,
like maybe sort of impossible translation project,
we usually choose to collaborate on it.
So we're working right now on a book by the Peruvian artist,
Guiseppe Campuzano, called The Museo Travesti del
Peru, The Travesti Museum of Peru,
which is totally impossible.
It's going to take us like just short of forever to finish it,
and maybe someday we'll be reading from it.
And we fairly recently collaborated
on translating Tella de Sevoya, Onion Cloth,
by Mexican writer, Myriam Moscona, which
traces some of the roots of her Bulgarian, Sephardic family,
in combination with the roots of judeo espanol, or ladino.
A language in danger of extinction, which you will
hear about more in a moment.