Romeo Oriogun announced co-winner of the John Logan Poetry Prize for students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, along with Abby Ryder-Huth. The judge was Kiki Petrosino.
Maria Fernanda Nuñez Alzate named a recipient of the 2020 Penland Core Fellowship, a two-year work study fellowship at the Penland School of Crafts, an international center for craft education located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The Penland Core Fellowship offers emerging artists the opportunity to explore artistic interests and career possibilities while living and working in a supportive creative community.
Nuñez is a Colombian-born artist currently based in Portland, Oregon. After spending her formative years in Bogotá, where she studied photography at the Zone Five School of Film and Photography, she relocated to the United States in 2011 to pursue a BFA in Sculpture at the California College of the Arts, which she completed in 2015. She is currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, where she also works as a design and research assistant. Although her interests are interdisciplinary, her work is primarily sculpture-based, utilizing a wide range of materials and focusing on themes of hybridity and liminality. Her latest body of work, “Fragments of the Incorruptible Corpse,” draws upon a collection of nonfiction writing and drawings as well as video and installation components.
To see Penland School of Craft’s announcement click here.
In public testimony at the Department of State Lands in Salem on Tuesday, December 10, 2019, OICR urges the members of the Oregon State Land Board to leave the Elliott State Forest inviolate and inviolable, with a complete ban on roads and logging.
SOURCES
Rob Davis, “After logging 420-year-old tree, Oregon State announces new protections for old growth,”The Oregonian/Oregon Live, updated Oct 22, 2019; posted Oct 21, 2019.
George Plaven, “OSU celebrates opening of mass timber research lab,” Capital Press, October 15, 2019
READING
Sir James Frazer, “Departmental Kings of Nature,” The New Sacred Bough, 70-72
Cristal Otero (far right)
Pat LeGates (far left)
Emily Hyde (far left)
Barry Sanders (right)
Anne-Marie Oliver (left)
For more information about this event click here
THE OREGON INSTITUTE FOR CREATIVE RESEARCH IS PROUD TO JOIN THE YOUTH CLIMATE LEADERS OF PDX, OUR FRIENDS AROUND THE GLOBE, AND FELLOW INHABITANTS OF EARTH, OF EVERY AGE AND FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, IN SUPPORTING THE GLOBAL CLIMATE STRIKE TOMORROW, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2019, WITH THE PORTLAND RALLY COMMENCING AT PORTLAND CITY HALL, 10:30 A.M.
RÓBERT GÁL is a Slovak writer, editor, and publisher based in Prague, the Czech Republic. Working at the intersection of genres and media, heis the author of several books of aphorisms, fiction, and philosophical fragments available in English translation, including Naked Thoughts (Black Sun Lit, 2019), Agnomia (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), On Wing (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015), and Signs & Symptoms (Twisted Spoon Press, 2003), and has also collaborated with composers, dancers, filmmakers, and visual artists in performance and installation work across Europe and the U.S. In Fall 2019, he was a Resident in the 12-week International Residency for Established Writers at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. He is the 2019 IWP@OICR Writer-in-Residence at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research.
Medieval historian and critic Ivan Illich proposed a search for a new askesis, a set of practices that make virtuous action possible. Friendship is, for Illich, that new askesis, the only properly human response to radical dehumanization, the reduction of people into components of the several key systems he identified and analyzed over the course of some twenty years: economic systems, transportation systems, pedagogical systems, medical systems. Friendship is a relationship built on faith, humility, and poverty of spirit. It is the very basis of hospitality, impelling/inviting one to say “no, thank you” to the ruling assumptions of scarcity, progress, and competition that systems catalyze and on which they rely. “Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge,” notes Illich in “The Cultivation of Conspiracy” (1998). “I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.” Here, twenty years down the line, in an act of homage if not pilgrimage, I return to the meditations on otherness, powerlessness, and love of “the prophet of Cuernavaca,” the means by which he believed an art of living could be established and fostered. With the help of a wide range of diverse interlocutors, including Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Wendell Berry, and Srecko Horvat, among others, I rethink, and think through, the possibility of the sovereignty of friendship today, the relationship that exists solely in itself and for itself, and, as such, categorically refuses assimilation into, and cooptation by, any system.
Guest Lecturer Bennett Gilbert, Senior Instructor in University Studies, Portland State University, and author, A Personalist Philosophy of History (Routledge, 2019): “Two Ways to Think in Two Directions at the Same Time”
Members of the Oregon Institute for Creative Research hold roundtable on the unedited, advance version of the UN-backed “Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services” with Our Children's Trust’s Jacob Lebel at the 600-acre, biodynamic Broken Branch Farm in southern Oregon, Saturday, August 10, 2019. Featuring Special Guest Regina Scharf, environmental journalist and former member of the United Nations Environmental Program Finance Initiative
Maria Fernanda Nuñez is a Colombian-born artist based in Portland, Oregon. After spending her formative years in Bogotá, where she studied photography at the Zone Five School of Film and Photography, she relocated to the United States in 2011 to pursue a BFA in Sculpture at the California College of the Arts, which she completed in 2015. Upon graduation, she worked as a furniture apprentice in Houston, Texas, where she also participated in a home-building project, and, later, attended the Penland School of Crafts, where she studied blacksmithing and metalwork. In 2016, she was a Resident Intern at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the following year was awarded a Windgate Craft Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, for which she served as a juror in 2018. During her time in Portland, she has shown and performed work at the ADX Annex Gallery and Screaming Sky Gallery and is currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, where she also works as a design and research assistant. Although her interests are multifarious and interdisciplinary, much of her work is sculpture-based, utilizing a wide range of materials and focusing on themes of hybridity and liminality. Her latest body of work, “Fragments of the Incorruptible Corpse,” draws upon a collection of nonfiction writing and drawings as well as video and installation components.
Susan Cohen is Founding Chair of Immigration Practice at the Boston firm Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, where she oversees the work of 12 attorneys and 18 immigration specialists, and President of the Board of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, which since 1989, provides free legal services to asylum seekers and promotes the rights of detained immigrants. She has chaired and co-chaired a wide range of committees of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), including the National Planning Committee for AILA’s Annual Immigration Law Conference. She has served as a member of the review board for AILA periodicals as well as the American Bar Association’s liaison to the Department of Labor on immigration-related issues. She is a frequent panelist at AILA, ABA, and other immigration-related conferences, and a contributor to numerous immigration-related publications. Among her many accomplishments are contributions to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) regulations implementing the Immigration Act of 1990, the Department of Labor regulations implementing changes to the H-1B visa category as a result of the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998, the Department of Labor PERM labor certification regulations issued in 2004, the drafting of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts legislation that resulted in the Massachusetts Global Entrepreneur in Residence (GEIR) program in 2014, and the temporary restraining order on the 2017 Travel Ban obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts and other organizations. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her political asylum work, including awards from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project, and the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly. She writes for and appears frequently in the media, from Bloomberg to the PBS NewHour to the Washington Post. In addition to her legal work, she is also a songwriter and the founder of White Dove Projects. Two of her songs have been performed by students and alumni of the Berklee College of Music in Boston—“Beyond the Borders,” which concerns the plight of a Syrian refugee family, and “Looking for the Angels,” her second music video about an Honduran teenager bidding farewell to his grandmother, as he leaves to escape the brutal violence in their country." Many students who participated were from countries affected by the travel ban, including lead singer Nano Raies, the first Syrian woman to study at Berklee.
Michael W. Klein is William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. His research and teaching focus on international macroeconomics. Trained at Brandeis and Columbia Universities, he is the author of three books and over two dozen articles on a range of topics, including exchange rate policy, international capital flows, the impact of trade on the U.S. labor market, and the determinants of foreign direct investment. From 2010-2011, he served as the chief economist in the Office of International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Founder, Research Director, and Co-executive Editor of EconoFact, a website that provides economic analysis on timely policy issues (econofact.org). He has been a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Dallas.
Nigerian poet Romeo Oriogun is the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, with the judges calling him “an urgent new voice in African poetry.” Author of the chapbooks Burnt Men (Praxis) and The Origin of Butterflies (APBF and Akashic Books), he was shortlisted for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets in 2017 for his manuscript My Body Is No Miracle. His poems have appeared in the literary magazine Prairie Schooner as well as on-line at the Dissident Blog, Connotation Press, and Brittle Paper, among others. He was a 2019 IIE—Artist Protection Fund Fellow placed in residence with Scholars at Risk, the W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. He joins the Oregon Institute for Creative Research as its Summer 2019 Visiting Artist.
Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa (b. 1960, Barcelona, Spain) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and philosopher based in New York. Her new media works have been exhibited internationally, and her writing, influenced by both Continental philosophy and feminism, addresses questions of language and the feminine, the act of reading and writing, and “ethics as first philosophy.” She is the author of a study on G. W. F. Hegel and Emmanuel Levinas, Total History, Anti-History, and the Face That Is Other (Atropos Press), and co-editor, with Lenart Škof, of Bodily Proximity (Ljubljana: Nova revija). Her critical essays have appeared in Breathing with Luce Irigaray, edited by L. Škof & E. Holmes (Bloomsbury Press), and in a special issue on Julia Kristeva in the Cincinnati Romance Review 35, among other publications. Her artwork has been featured at the Museo Laboratorio Di Arte Contemporanea, Universita degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paolo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Aperto '93, and XLV Venice Biennale. Hackenberg y Almansa grew up in Spain, Germany, Japan, Canada, and the United States. She was awarded a B.A. from San Francisco State University, an M.A. from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland. She has taught Media Art, Installation, and Performative Practices at New York University (NYU) and Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Aesthetics at the European Graduate School (EGS). She has been a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Critical Theory and Creative Research Program (CT+CR), Portland, OR. Currently, she is a Dissertation and Independent Study Director at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland, Maine.
Trace Fleeman y Garcia
Poster Presentation
Portland Urban Wildlife Conference
Much contemporary discourse informing attitudes towards wildlife is based on the single proposition that humans and nonhumans belong to, and belong in, different spaces, with a few acceptable interlopers in the form of domesticated animals, animals-as-property, interspecies families, and so forth. The concept of “urban wildlife,” in and of itself, throws the status quo into question and represents a conceptual advance, for what has not yet been adequately theorized are new types of post-species arrangements and dynamics. As an ecologist and eco-activist, I am interested especially in the possible vacuum that might arise with the demise of species-ism, considering such a possibility as both a challenge and an opportunity for rethinking the notion of species as well as imagining radically different relationships and arrangements between humans and other animals. With this presentation, I seek to outline not a political program but various spaces for post-species possibilities, both sacred and profane.
See conference details here
Nigerian poet Romeo Oriogun is the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, with the judges calling him “an urgent new voice in African poetry.” Author of the chapbooks Burnt Men (Praxis) and The Origin of Butterflies (APBF and Akashic Books), he was shortlisted for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets in 2017 for his manuscript My Body Is No Miracle. His poems have also appeared in the literary magazine Prairie Schooner as well as on-line at the Dissident Blog, Connotation Press, and Brittle Paper, among others. He was a 2019 IIE—Artist Protection Fund Fellow placed in residence with Scholars at Risk, the W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute, and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. He joins the OICR as a Summer 2019 Visiting Artist.
Read Elegy for a Burnt Friend here
1,000,000 species threatened with extinction. Nature’s Dangerous Decline “Unprecedented.” Species Extinction Rates “Accelerating.” Current global response insufficient. Indigenous and local knowledge drawn upon as models for the first time in addition to scientific and governmental sources. “Transformative changes” needed to restore and protect nature. Opposition from vested interests can [and must] be overcome for public good. Past predictions seriously underestimated the damage and devastation.
“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES [Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services] Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture. The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
– IPBES Chair Sir Robert Watson
Click here to read the May 6, 2019 IPBES media release
Click here to read the 39-page abbreviated report
2019 CT+CR Spring Colloquium & Artist Residency at House on Metolius
Image Credit: House on Metolius
Dates: Wednesday, April 24-Saturday, April 27, 2019
Theme: “Springtime Waters” (after Gaston Bachelard’s essay “Clear Waters, Springtime Waters and Running Waters”)
Faculty: Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Sanders, Directors
Chef: Emily Squandra
Participants: Erika M. Anderson, Trace Fleeman y Garcia, Emily Hyde, Brian Liu, Maria Fernanda Nuñez, Sophie Sumney-Koivisto, Nicholas Tarter, Mark Tracy
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SCHEDULE
WEDNESDAY, April 24
12:30 p.m.: convene in front of the Attic Institute
1:00 p.m.: depart Portland for House on Metolius, Camp Sherman
4:00-6:30 p.m.: settling in (snacks available in Eleanor’s Cottage)
6:30-8:00 p.m.: celebratory inaugural dinner
8:30 p.m.: desert films, followed by group discussion
THURSDAY, April 25
8:30-9:30 a.m.: breakfast
10:00-12:30 a.m.: Seminar 1
1:00-2:00 p.m.: lunch
2:30-5:30 p.m.: Seminar 2
5:30-6:00 p.m.: roam and wander
6:30-8:00 p.m.: dinner
8:30 p.m.: desert films, followed by group discussion
FRIDAY, April 26
8:30-9:30 a.m.: breakfast
10:00 a.m.: depart for Richardson’s Ranch, where we will spend the day rockhounding
1:30 p.m.: lunch in Bend
7:30 p.m.: dinner back at House on Metolius
SATURDAY, April 27
8:30-9:30 a.m.: breakfast & recap, “Springtime Waters”
9:30-10:30 a.m.: pack up
11:00 a.m.: head back towards Portland
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READINGS
Seminar 1
Gaston Bachelard, selections from Water and Dreams: “Clear Waters, Springtime Waters and Running Waters,” 19-43, and “The Supremacy of Fresh Water,” 151-157
Gaston Bachelard, “Water Lilies or Surprises of a Summer's Dawn,” The Right to Dream, 3-6
Madame Michelet, “River Scenery” (final section on the Mississippi), Nature or the Poetry of Earth & Sea, 271-275 (with 200 b/w illustrations by Giacomelli)
Julia Kristeva, “Narcissus: The New Insanity,” Tales of Love, 103-121
Seminar 2
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, & Murray Silverstein, selections from A Pattern Language: “Access to Water,” 135-138, and “Pools and Streams,” 322-327
David Laskin, “Writer's Weather,” Rains All the Time, 151-185
F. Batmanghelidj, “The New Paradigm,” Your Body's Many Cries for Water, 13-24
B. C. J. Zoeteman, “Introduction,” Sensory Assessment of Water Quality, 1-18
Gregory Bateson, "Ecology of the Mind - The Sacred," Sacred Unity, 265-270
Gregory Bateson, "Mind/Environment," Sacred Unity, 161-173
Ivan Illich, “Water’s Dual Nature: Purity and Cleanliness,” H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, 27-30
“Water Is Life,” Standing Rock: https://standwithstandingrock.net/mni-wiconi/
Seminar 3 (PDX)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Perceptual Faith and Reflection,” The Visible and the Invisible, 28-49
Gérard Genette, “Failing Natural Languages,” Mimologics, 201-247
Sir James George Frazer, selections from The New Golden Bough: “The Magical Control of the Weather,” 38-53, “Departmental Kings of Nature,” 70-72, and “Primitive Theogamy,” “Egeria and Numa," and "Roman Kings,” 96-100
Elias Canetti, “Crowd Symbols” (“Rivers,” especially), Crowds and Power, 75-90
Robert McFarlane, “The Woods and the Water” and “Glossary III: Waterlands,” Landmarks, 95-138
Seminar 4
Rachel Carson, “Surface Waters and Underground Seas,” Silent Spring, 39-51
Rachel Carson, “Rivers of Death,” Silent Spring, 129-152
The Heinz Center, “Physical Outcomes of Dam Removal,” Dam Removal - Science and Decision Making, 98-132
Cynthia D. Stowell, “Salmon--Continuity for a Culture,” Western Water Made Simple, 71-80
Charles Fishman, “The Revenge of Water,” The Big Thirst, 1-24
Blaine Harden, “Wild and Scenic Atomic River,” A River Lost, 147-173
FILMS
Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalkr (Soviet Union, 1973), 183 minutes (original cut: 205 minutes)
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (France, 1983), 100 minutes
Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild (USA, 2012), 93 minutes
Elia Kazan, Wild River (USA, 1960), 52 minutes
Roman Polanski, Chinatown (USA, 1974), 131 minutes
Icíar Bollaín, Tambien la Lluvia (Even the Rain) (Spain/Mexico/France, 2010), 104 minutes
Steven Zaillian, A Civil Action (USA, 1998), 115 minutes
Robert Redford, The Milagro Beanfield War (USA, 1988), 117 minutes
Steven Soderbergh, Erin Brockovich (USA, 2000), 130 minutes
*The last six films are cited on the website of the Water and Society group at Michigan State University, to which we offer our appreciation. For more information on this group, visit <www.waterandsociety.leadr.msu.edu>.
Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press. A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, was published by Red Hen in 2017. His poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Blackbird, The Common, From the Fishouse, Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Poets & Writers, storySouth, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Writer’s Chronicle, among others. He earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, and has taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program, Warren Wilson College; Great Smokies Writing Program, University of North Carolina, Asheville; and the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, Queen’s University of Charlotte as well as serving as a Visiting Writer at a host of institutions, including Franklin and Marshall, Institute of American Indian Arts, Pitzer College, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Meacham Conference), UNC-Wilmington’s Writers Week, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.
He is the recipient of fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, and Asheville Area Arts Council, as well being awarded a Bernard DeVoto Fellowship in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Formerly the editor of Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, he now serves on the editorial board of Q Avenue Press, where he designs, edits, and produces collaborative chapbooks and letterpress broadsides. In addition, he has served as poetry editor for Ecotone: Re-Imagining Place and as guest editor at the Asheville Poetry Review, working with editor Keith Flynn on its jazz issue. His collages have been exhibited at Asheville Book Works and William King Museum’s Contemporary Regional Gallery and featured in Asheville Poetry Review, Café Review, and Iron Horse Review. He curated the show From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1967) for the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center as well as edited the exhibition catalogue. He is a member of the Advisory Board for Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters.
