Poetry Expo 24
/ 15 February 2024
Oh Great Water! Octopus Love & Medusa Muses
Collaborations in Aquatic Poetic Ritualistic Videopoems between two Islander Artists
Poetry Expo 24
As part of Tania's project The Technology of Tenderness, in which tenderness becomes a heART form of tending to the wounds on our planet via soft technologies such as poetry, she is compiling a 'toolbox' of theoretical approaches, such as the decolonizing possibilities in Karen Barad's theory of Agential Realism. Confused by quantum terms and concepts, she began an ecopoetic inquiry practice of exploring words like diffraction, entanglement or intra-action via poems linked to emo-sense-based experiencing of her home island's fauna and flora, and the postcolonial eco-social-justice issues within the fabric of Mauritian socio-politic-economics; allowing her to engage with complex, sometimes abstract terminology via her body, art and craft.
This practice of entangled understanding via ecopoetic inquiry has led to a series of videopoems in collaboration with multimedia animist artist Carine Iriarte, (originally from Oleron island), as part of her Poetics of Reverie project – a collaborative artistic project combining poetry, painting, electro music, short films, body and nature, with the aspiration to poetically inhabit the flesh of the world.
The collaboration between Carine & Tania, is a deeply nourishing cross-cultural artistic sharing from north to south and back again. Apart from English & French, they have found common language forms and symbolism through their deep love and respect for the spirit of water and their mutually carnal-spiritual-sensual experiencing of the ocean. This more than cultural understanding unites them in a wish to express, share and spread the deep joy of connection to our bodies of water, human and more than human.
For the purposes of this expo, they wish to share a conversation regarding their experiences collaborating on videopoems, including filming and recording together on the island of Corsica in 2022, as well as screen two or three of their recent works (some still in the making) , for a total of thirty minutes, with 10 to 15 afterwards for questions. Max total time: 45 minutes.
More about the project here.
The project is part of the subthemes Climate Crisis and Poetry and Global unity and shared futures.
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Author
Carine Iriarte
Born on January 8, 1975 in Angoulême (France). Holder of a Bachelor’s degree in Human Sciences (Visual Arts) and a Bachelor’s degree in Language Sciences (Digital Communication and New Media). First a soldier in the French Armed Forces, then a freelance graphic designer and artistic director, she decided in 2018 to explore fully personal artistic creation and sound therapy
Since 2011, she lives and works between the south and the west coast of France, where the Mediterranean/Atlantic landscapes are part of her artistic work. She focuses more specifically on the body’s relationship with the water element — through her main subject of research : the mystical eros, a carnal and ethereal aqueous initiation, more commonly called in animism ‘spiritual marriage with water spirit’.In 2021, she launched “Poetics of Reverie”, a collaborative artistic project combining poetry, painting, electro music, short films, body and nature, with the aspiration to poetically inhabit the flesh of the world. She collaborates with poets, videographers, painters, musicians to experience vibration through slow movement, touch, sound, silence, poetic acts, symbolic language, bodily interactions with the mineral-vegetal-animal world.
Author
Tania Haberland
Tania Haberland (BA,HDE, MA) is a poet, bodyworder and biophilic artivist, born in South Africa to a Mauritian mother and a German father, raised in Arabia, miseducated in America and matured in Europe, with the water remaining her primary home (and muse) no matter what land she lives on. Tania has presented her intercultural work, her 'carnal poetics' and ecopoetic rituals, in festivals and performances around the world and loves collaborating with a wide variety of artists, animals and plants. She currently lives between Mauritius and Italy with her partner Fabrizio Dalle Piane, where she works on developing The Technology of Tenderness and their CreatiVita project. Her first poetry collection, Hyphen, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2010. Her poem Resurrection was shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak award in 2016. Her first bilingual book Water Flame / Fiamma d’acqua was published by Mille Gru Editions in 2019. Tania was a resident curator/writer for Passa Porta in 2021 and Versopolis poet in 2020. Tania found her life motto on an eco-friendly shopping bag in San Francisco: “Shit Happens. Make Compost!”
