Poetry Expo 26
/ 3 February 2026
‘Long Now – A Sonic Horizon of Loss, Light, and Continuum’
Poetry Expo 2026
Long Now is conceived as a verbo-visual installation on an absolute black background. No images: the landscape is generated solely by the reading voice. This darkness is crossed only by English subtitles translating the Italian text; when the words dissolve, a trace darker than black remains on the background, a residual horizon that lingers in the eye. The long now is a ‘long present’: the enduring Palestinian situation, the stars that precede and outlast human life, memory stretching like continuous time.
The voice constructs a geological landscape of Arabic star names, symbolic names of Palestinian children who were killed, extinct animals, and digital residues. A topography of trauma and the Anthropocene: uncultivated lands, polluted waters, rubble, stars lighting up like concretions of memory. The names of stars, extinct species, and children (Algieba, Alnitak, Sabik, Canis dirus, Mintaka, Caretta caretta, Menkent, Saiph, Ahmed, Equus ferus, Acrab, Vega, Noor, Hadi, Deneb, Samer, Fomalhaut, Yasmin, Nashira) emerge as points of light within layered strata.
The structure recalls one-line haiku: verses in a single breath intertwining stars, bodies, extinct animals, and symbolic traces of genocide. Against the black background, the voice becomes the only landscape – a hermetic flow in which nature and the artificial, memory and ruin coexist in a single, unending present.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction.
Author
Alessandra Greco
Alessandra Greco lives in Florence. Through writing she investigates the various aspects of the process of thought as a flow and in relation to images, through the editing technique.
Among the most recent publications, "Stellare nero", for the Fogli Benway Series, new series, n·13, Colorno Tielleci, 2023. A hexagonal kaleidocycle composed of words that rotates around an empty center. The words return cyclically and reformulate the narrative structure of the text with each rotation.
She is anthologized in "CONTINUO - REPERTORY OF COMPLEX WRITINGS", [dia٠foria - 2023, the first volume of a permanent observatory on "complex writings".
She is among the authors of "BAU Container of Contemporary Culture", n·19 - Viareggio 2023.
She wrote "ascending roots", 2021, for L'Ulisse, magazine of poetry, arts and writings, XXIV, dedicated to the monographic theme Rewriting nature / Crossing the landscape (Lietocolle, 2021). The ascending roots project includes a dedicated photographic series and video. A Still from the video was acquired in April 2023 in the collection of Villa Rondinelli of San Domenico, Fiesole (Fi), within the curatorial program "Out of Court, In friendship" - Art and Botany Section, promoted by Villa Rondinelli, focused about the intersection of nature, art and craft.
One of her contributions within the project "Audio doc sound - starting from a visual script to arrive at a sound document", edited by Pietro D'Agostino, is in Audio doc sound Title#3, 2021.
She wrote "NT (Nessun Tempo)", Arcipelago Itaca, Lacustrine Series, 2020, finalist in the Lorenzo Montano Prize, XXXIV Edition, 2020 and in the Elio Pagliarani Prize, VI Edition, 2020.
"Del venire avanti nel giorno, Libro Azzurro", Lamantica Edizioni, 2019, third place in the Anna Osti Prize, XVII Edition, 2019. Some composition titles of the album "SISMONASTIE" by Elio Martusciello (em_music 2023) are adapted from the book.
Her texts are translated in "Babel, Stati di Alteration", a plurilingual anthology edited by Enzo Campi, Bertoni Editore (2022), and in "oomph! – contemporary works in translation / a multilingual anthology, vol. 2" (2018).
She created performances and readings with attention to sound and his research extended to photography. Her writings and images have appeared in magazines and lit-blogs including "Carteggi Letterari", "Clean", "Il Cucchiaio nell'Orecchio", "eexxiitt.blogspot.com", "GAMMM" "Death by water, abysmal writings ”, “Ulysses”, “Indian Nation”, “Niederngasse”, “UTSANGA”, “Versodove”.
