Co-presented by the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Event 3 in Black Is...Black Ain't  | Black Study 2.0

Welcome to "Liquid Stars: Translation, Digression, Transformation" the third event in our Black Study 2.0 series: Black Is...Black Ain't and a featured evening in the  Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series' 2020-2021 season. The event features the brilliant Cecilia Vicuña & Rosa Alcalá in an evening of translation, transformation, performance, digression, and poetry, and in conversation with Dawn Lundy Martin and Angie Cruz.

This event will be a special, one-of-a-kind occasion where Cecilia Vicuña & Rosa Alcalá will share and translate new work, present rare, uncovered performance footage, and showcase their translation process like never before.

Photo  Credits: Photo of Cecilia Vicuña by Jane England | Photo of Rosa Alcalá by Margarita Mejía

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. Vicuña began creating "precarious works" and  quipus in the mid 1960s in Chile, as a way of "hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard." Her multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. These ephemeral, site-specific installations in nature, streets, and museums combine ritual and assemblage. She calls this impermanent, participatory work “lo precario” (the precarious): transformative acts that bridge the gap between art and life, the ancestral and the avant-garde. Her paintings of early 1970s de-colonized the art of the conquerors and the "saints" inherited from the Catholic Church, to create irreverent images of the heroes of the revolution. A partial list of museums that have exhibited her work include: The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) London; Art in General in NYC; The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London; The Berkeley Art Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Vicuña has published twenty-two art and poetry books, including Kuntur Ko (Tornsound, 2015), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Instan (Kelsey Street Press, 2001) and Cloud Net (Art in General, 2000). Her Selected Poems is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in 2017. In 2009, she co-edited The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: 500 years of Latin American Poetry. She edited ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets in 1997. She was appointed the Messenger Lecturer 2015 at Cornell University, an honor bestowed on authors who contribute to the "evolution of civilization for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business, and social life." She divides her time between Chile and New York.

Rosa Alcalá is the author of three books of poetry: Undocumentaries (Shearsman Books, 2010), The Lust of Unsentimental Waters (Shearsman Books, 2011), and MyOTHER TONGUE (Futurepoem, 2017). Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2019; The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them by Stephanie Burt (Harvard UP, 2016); American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, edited by Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy (Wesleyan UP, 2018): and Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, edited by Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez (Counterpath, 2014).  Her work as a translator has focused on contemporary Latin American women poets living in the U.S. Most recently, she edited and co-translated Cecilia Vicuña: New & Selected Poems (Kelsey Street Press, 2018). She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a finalist for a PEN Translation Award. She is a Professor in the Bilingual MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso, and she has given talks, readings, and workshops in both the U.S. and Latin America

The Center for African American Poetry & Poetics’ (CAAPP) Black Study 2.0 series, “Black is…Black Ain’t” features poet and translator Rosa Alcalá,  transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi´, poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, poet Natalie Diaz, poet Terrance Hayes, poet Ladan Osman, poet-journalist Jacqui Germain, culture writer/scholar Lauren Michele Jackson, filmmaker Tayarisha Poe, writer and performance artist lê thị diễm thúy, poet and visual artist Aldrin Valdez, poet Divya Victor, and poet and performance artist Cecilia Vicuña. The series is organized around various themes while all exploring ideas of Blackness’s fugitivity, its runaway state, how it can attach to other bodies who must then take up a disparaged subjectivity, and, too, creativity.

In this Black Study series, CAAPP’s programming will be intentionally African diasporic and in conversation with the range of Indigenous and displaced peoples of color. In this Study, we focus our collective curatorial lens on creating, rethinking, working together to shift inherited categories and ideas of race/Black/etc. We might think of the virtual events as connected to the following thought experiment: what if together in community we try to upend the blatant, subtle, and invisible modes of domination using our creative practice?

We hope you'll join us for the entire series!

The PCWS brings notable writers to Pitt’s main campus every year. Thanks to funding from the office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences, the series is free and open to the public and features contemporary writers with extraordinary talent in fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

CAAPP’s programming is made possible by the generous support of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of the Arts & Sciences and The Dietrich Foundation.

CAAPP + PCWS Present: "Liquid Stars: Translation, Digression, Transformation" ft. Cecilia Vicuña & Rosa Alcalá