Architectures of Disappearance: In Conversation with Contemporary Poets

Jacket2 is a publication out of the Kelly Writer's House in Philadelphia, PA, offering "commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics" with a particular kinship for experimental approaches. I began a Commentary Series in Jacket2 in parallel with our Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP research project. The Commentary is a twelve-part series that allows for sustained consideration of a common theme, with wide-ranging references. I was compelled towards this format for the possibility it offered of exploring ideas and engaging in conversations as our project unfolded.

Called Architectures of Disappearance, I describe the scope of the series:

"Drawing on approaches of carceral geography, this Commentary convenes contemporary poetry, visual art and performance that takes a geographical approach to making visible physical and linguistic architectures of movement constriction.

Funded by The Humanities Collaborative at El Paso Community College-University of Texas at El Paso in 2021-22, I lead the project as faculty fellow, collaborating in collective study with a group of student fellows whose words, doubts, sparks, and leads will also shape this page. I have the expectant hope that the Commentary form will invite investigations that mutate out of our embodied experiments, archival research, and community writing workshops in El Paso throughout Fall 2021. Study will be constituted by the snags, glitches, and serendipities of a virtual research process built on relationships and emergence.

Architectures of Disappearance comes out of my current work on a documentary poetry project called POST BOND (excerpt in Tripwire), focused on one square mile in east El Paso containing the ICE detention center, migrant shelter, post office exchange, airport runway and NASA forward operating location."

One of the goals in engaging the series was to take the opportunity of the platform to reach out to contemporary artists and poets whose work inspired and provoked the direction of our project. We first gathered in conversation with Juárez-based artist Alejandra Aragón to speak about the collaborative performance, film and zine project she led entitled 'Los muros no son para siempre / Walls are not forever.' In an introduction to the project, I described:

"The zine opens to a map of dotted lines: barbs on a wire, punctured lines symbol of trails, punctuation of walking routes. The lines trace a walk taken on October 13, 2019, by border artists Maire Reyes, Nayeli Hernández, Iris Díaz, Ana Iram, Paloma Galavíz, Olga Guerra, Marcia Santos, and Alejandra Aragón. The walk traverses between the artists’ homes through Ciudad Juárez, on the border of El Paso, TX, concluding that “the entire city and its dynamics of exploitation and precariousness is a barrier of containment.” The project was created for the second International Encounter of Objects and Walls by Tlaxcala 3 (Mexico City) as a critical examination on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is accompanied by a film, Los muros no son para siempre (Walls are not forever). This is a project about how to perforate a line through route design, and how to document the body’s registration of constriction by walking."



This artwork clearly bears many common threads to our curation of Sound Walks in relation to carceral geography in El Paso. After engaging closely with the work, Rebekah Patnode, Tatiana Rodriguez and I had a wide-ranging conversation with Aragón, which we reflected on in a collaboratively written Commentary that is upcoming.

Our second conversation, with Houston-based language worker JD Pluecker, was defined by a warm curiosity around common questions and provoked considerations that we continued to reference in our meetings together for weeks after. We focused on Pluecker's project Swamps Fly, which I described in an introductory commentary, Reading JD Pluecker's Swamps Fly :

"JD Pluecker’s Swamps Fly is a work of 'halloing the wasteland' — greeting anew, pursuing in shouts, seeing/seeping pervasively amid the moor. Against the hollowing of draining, swamp is met as the listless and listened steadfast space."

Rebekah Patnode's vibrant and eloquent reflections on the conversation shaped our collaboratively-written Commentary, 'Attention is the most important thing we can give to one another': In conversation with JD Pluecker. Rebekah Patnode wrote in the introduction to this Commentary:

"Pluecker shows what lingers. In Swamps Fly, the carcerality of Houston’s existence (as Houston-the-unswamp, drained and deswamped by enslaved people of color) is communicated through description of what subsists from 1836, when the Republic of Texas was created to ensure slavery’s endurance, and Houston was settled. The birds, water, alligators, floodplain, insects linger — all archive of the swamp that the modern unswamp was. Pluecker uses time, historical archive, sound, and smells that linger in the space as reference points to draw attention to the settler colonial carceral history of Houston. In collaboration with artist Elana Mann, these elements are archived in another layer of time, closer to now, as monument to that lingering, declaration of the subsistence of the space’s continuous carcerality by evidencing that it reveals itself: a place where water moves, dirt is dark, leaves embed the floor of a drastically changed ecosystem that would revert anytime if it was released."



We came to the dialogue with JD Pluecker as an opportunity to not only consider ideas, but moreover to learn about tangible tools of attention and documentation within a landscape of disappeared histories:

"We approached our conversation with JD Pluecker amid a semester working to create sound walk routes relating to carceral geography in El Paso, Texas. We reached out, yearning for practical tools for experiencing places as archives that can be registered in language. More than a theory, we needed to know: what actually happens when you’re there? This tactical need shaped a fervent and generous conversation that allowed us to consider more amply the process of directing and documenting attention.

We are at a point in our project of writing walking scores for participants along a series of routes that, through their curation, make an argument about unexpected ubiquities of carceral space. We had become curious about how to write in a way that shaped attention while also staying conscious of the application of instructions to a place. Our first drafts of walking scores were rife with imperatives (turn left, go straight, look up), and something felt off. We were interested in how Pluecker had created this project that was about being in a place that had been absolutely shaped by imperatives imposed on the swamp: stay here, don’t budge, don’t bulge. Nevertheless, as readers of Swamps Fly, our attention felt stewarded without the force of imperatives."

Our project continues to be shaped by encounters with contemporary experimental artists who are weaving between history, poetics, media arts, performance, critical social theory, landscape studies, and more. Next semester, we plan to continue these conversations hosted by the Jacket2 platform, through dialogue with a range of poets, urban planners, sound artists, and anthropologists whose work provides exemplars for our project.

Written by Honora Spicer, Faculty Fellow
El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

All images courtesy of Honora Spicer.