2009-02-16T22:58:00.000-08:00

Investigation #1:

Emily Abendroth & Miranda Mellis

March 4th, 7pm/ Get Lost Bookstore

1825 Market St.

San Francisco

With a follow-up discussion-experiment: March 7th

(location tba)

Emily: My talk will be rooted in the findings of an ongoing research project that looks into the history of solitary confinement practices in penal institutions throughout the United States, but most particularly as they/are were utilized at Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary in the early 1800's and at Guantanamo Bay today. In addition to exploring the material and human conditions of these sites, my process of inquiry aims to conceptually investigate the vocabularies, taxonomies, and social and state understandings that made the ongoing legitimation of these environment's existences possible, and how it might futurally be disrupted.

Miranda: I will read from MATERIALISMS, which records and amplifies language derived from two disparate American archives (open cases.) First, from the medical records of a community of iron miners and loggers (1900-1934) in Northern Michigan. The medical case files explicitly and implicitly evidence the traumas and abuses of capitalist exploitation. The high diction of the turn-of-the-century rural doctor who wrote the files, my great-grandfather, describes at once obsolete anesthetics and obsolete aesthetics: literary professionalism. The second vein also pulls from an atavistic 'felt' archive: childhood in a Marxist-Leninist collective in the Haight-Ashbury during the 1970's and 80's. These two materialisms--the production of iron ore and lumber on one end of the century and the production of anti-capitalist ideology on the other--constitute a framework in which to sound out the contradictions in instrumentalist production and idiom.

Emily Abendroth is a writer and artist, alternately residing in the San Francisco Bay area and Philadelphia, where she co-curates the Moles not Molar Reading Series with poet Justin Audia. Her book-length work in progress Muzzle Blast Dander can be found in Refuge/Refugee (Volume 3 of the Chain Link book series. Recent work of hers can be found or is forthcoming in Digital Artifact, Encyclopedia, How2, Pocket Myths, Horseless Review, Eco-poetics, and Cut and Paint. Her chapbook, Toward Eadward Forward was published by Horse less Press this past november. She is currently and ever-so-slowly piecing her way through some writings and thinking on solitary confinement practices in U.S. prisons.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press), Materialisms (Portable press at Yo Yo labs), and Transformer (forthcoming). She is an editor at The Encyclopedia Project and teaches at California Colleges of the Arts.

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