B R U N A presented the second event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

For this event, poet, lyric essayist, and artist DANIELLE Vogel presented an artist talk about The Earth Archives during her week-long residency at B R U N A. During her talk, Vogel shared inspirations for this archive and collected sentence-specimens from the audience.

ABOUT THE EARTH ARCHIVES

Water, earth, air, and fire are often considered in their physical forms, rooted within a particular place and time. In The Earth Archives, they are invisible and set loose into the air as audio recordings articulated by the voices of hundreds of people who share their own poetic memories and imaginaries of the four elements.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIELLE Vogel is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and ceremonialist. She is the author of the poetry collections Between Grammars, the forthcoming The Way a Line Hallucinates its Own Linearity, the artist book Narrative & Nest, and the e-chapbook In Resonance. As a writer, Vogel explores the bonds between language and presence, between a reader and a writer, and how a book, as an extended architecture of a body, might serve as a site of radical transformation. Her visual works—or “public ceremonies for language”— celebrate the archives of memory stored within language. They have been exhibited most recently at The Nordic House in Reykjavik, Iceland, RISD Museum, MICA, Temple and Pace Universities, and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She teaches at Wesleyan University and lives in New England with artist Renee Gladman.

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.