Performed at
Poetic Research Bureau
Los Angeles, California
09 January 2024
Curated by
Emji Saint Spero
Sound by
Jeremy Kennedy
Join us for the debut of Communicator Series with performances by Andrea Abi-Karam, Violet Spurlock, and Sammie Veeler to celebrate the launch of Spurlock’s first book In Lieu of Solutions, recipient of the Futurepoem’s Other Futures Award. In Lieu of Solutions whirls in the vertigo of gender transition and cascades into a questioning of intimacy, identity, and hope, asking poetry for what it cannot give in order to study what it offers instead.
About the Artists
Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, SWANA, punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019) and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). Their second book, Villainy (Nightboat Books, 2021) reimagines militant collectivity in the wake of the Ghost Ship Fire and the Muslim Ban. They are currently working on a poet's novel.
Violet Spurlock is a poet living in the Bay Area, where she is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first full-length collection, In Lieu of Solutions, won the Other Futures Award and was published by Futurepoem in 2023. Her chapbooks include Alloyed Bliss (Eyelet, 2021) and VS VS VS (GaussPDF, 2021).
In Lieu of Solutions investigates the problems that trans life creates for language while questioning contemporary assumptions about poetry as a tool for solving social and political problems. The poems both employ and dissect common poetic techniques in a probing and unsparing manner. Despite its critical bent, the book is not cynical in its view of poetry as a medium; instead it wagers that refusing to make poetry into a solution will amplify and radicalize its potent excitation of our thinking, our imagination, and our resolve.
Sammie Veeler is a Los Angeles based artist examining the role of computing in the production of individual and collective histories. She uses archives as an artistic form to express the false disjunction between her past life as a man and her unfolding present as a trans person. Through image making, video, performance, and world building, she exposes processes of becoming, weaving in the people and places that bear her forward.
Her work is rarely confined to a single site and constantly folds back on itself, forming intersecting loops in time. Her practice concerns technology and produces technical infrastructure. She is the co-founder of New Art City virtual art space, an online art gallery which has shown over 6,000 artists and reached 500,000 visitors since 2020. In 2023, she founded Virtual Access Lab as a non-profit research unit of New Art City, in collaboration with Gray Area. Virtual Access Lab supports accessible digital culture through software, commissions, and digital preservation.