Abigail LUCIEN: I’m interested in how we hold space for processing grief and healing, whether in a private or public space, at a time—maybe always in America—when Black individuals have to be concerned with safety. I imported something like 400 pounds of cocoa butter and made it into blocks cast directly from the foundation of SculptureCenter in New York. This was a way of building out Black space, specifically a space for rest, within an institution. The installation measures time by the gradual evaporation of the cocoa butter into the air, which is inhaled by folks within that space and then carried out.

Lydia OURAHMANE: I really love that, Abigail—moving through or even metabolizing material as the ultimate form of mourning.

But turn it around and say it on the other side: in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Adrienne Rich

Over the time that I’ve been teaching it’s been easy to observe how dependent we humans have become on what things are. In a discussion of work a disagreement would crop up that turned out to be because of the words they used. The feeling they were talking about was the same, they just used different labels for the things they identified. The dominance of the written word has allowed truth to be twisted by verbal fluency. Semantics scholar Bruce Powers wrote “…For thousands of years the left hemisphere has suppressed the qualitative judgment of the right and the human personality has suffered from it”. A google search will find several recent books advocating better use of both hemispheres. In his book, “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” Leonard Shlain noted that the rise of written language was accompanied by the rise of hierarchical societies. Once something was written down the idea existed outside the thinker. This led to disputes about which ideas were right and who had...

The Writing of Stones by Roger Caillois is so GOOD!

Expand the self to the point of dissolving the self.