Artists whose work resides in the in-between of dancing and farming, social sculpture and foraging, poetry and food magic, share their experiments with processing toxins and devouring dirt. Some tasty morsels may be served.

Narendra Haynes / Months of decay...

degraded powder with mealworm trails - devouring styrofoam - digestive processing - the sound of pathways

Candace Thompson / Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet

hugelkultur -- feral edible -- ginkgo nut -- wastelands -- brink -- extractive appetite -- petrochemical sacrifice zone -- arsenic, cadmium, lead -- disused tarmac -- wild brew

Precious Okoyomon / I would write poems and put them in trees and dig holes in the ground and plant them in the earth.

earthseed -- monstrous kudzu -- invasive threat -- wild pink peppercorns -- myrmecology -- King Lear -- dissociation + daydream -- spiral theory -- God

Poncili Creación X Juan Del Hierro / What we do is raw magic. We can come with a mask or without a mask. We can come screaming or not screaming.

discarded couch stuffing - texting is scriptwriting - We learned early from our carpenter father that anything can be built - We were told materials cost money, but we have learned that we can find them in the trash.

ROT TALKS is an experimental lecture series and decomposition class for the end times on the poetics of rot and the arts of breaking down. Guided by compost as metaphor and method, poet-artist-researchers of rot offer strategies to delight in ferment, heal a hurting earth, and exhibit a playful devotion to detritus and discard, at the level of land and of language.

Public Health Precautions

This is tentatively planned as a live outdoor event at St. Mark's Church. We are following (and exceeding) recommendations laid out by NY State for outdoor gatherings. These include: limiting the number of attendees to under 50; setting up seating with fixed and socially distant spacing; requiring and providing face masks, as well hand sanitizer stations. We will have 3 microphones on hand, and will be rotating / sanitizing these between readings. Attendees are required to register in advance, and contact information is collected at the point of registration in the event that we need to support any public health efforts around contact tracing. We are grateful to attendees for helping us maintain safety within our present public health context, and look forward to holding meaningful shared listening space together.