In August ‘08 I worked in New Orleans with artists and students and people in the community.

As
part of the process, I asked people to bring in bits of ceramic kitsch or other things from home to
make the work and somehow bring histories of objects and the life of objects from communities
into the space and into the forms that we would shape together.

In this case some of the artists brought me to their homes and workplaces. They offered so many
objects that were underwater during Hurricane Katrina. Just take what you want, they told me. I
wasn’t completely comfortable with this so I asked them to help me choose. What do you want to
bring into the space?
This is a chandelier that was underwater for several weeks.

It was under the house of Holis Hannan. She is a sculptor in New Orleans and her house went
through the storm to such a level that most of this very high piece of architecture on the right was
underwater and there are cat claw marks scored deeply into it.
For me, these marks of survival made by the cat over the weeks that the neighborhood was
underwater—she was leaping up there to keep out of the flood— these marks convey urgency.
They reflect something that I sense in the students right now. Marks of urgency infiltrate not just
my interactions in the gallery or the classroom but together with students and colleagues, I am
grappling with how do we move this practice, ceramics and other practices, to be relevant and
part of the way we maneuver survival in the 21st century?

- Linda Sormin (excerpt from “forage/salvage”, a conversation with Vancouver poet, Rita Wong)

The full version of “forage/salvage” will travel to:

Belladonna: Advancing Feminist Poetics and Activism: A Gathering
CUNY Graduate Center, Fall 2009

In celebration of its tenth year, Belladonna will join with The CUNY Graduate Center's Women's
Studies Certificate Program, Center for Research on Women and Society, Center for Humanities,
English Department, and Poetics Group to present a conference aimed at advancing and
broadcasting the life of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetics and Activism Today. The conference will
take place at the CUNY Graduate Center on September 24 and 25, 2009.

Our session:
Is Ground as to Figure as Ambience is to Body?
Ec(h)opoetics of the Disfigured ‘Land’scape

Friday, September 25

Moderator: Jennifer Scappettone

This discussion will sound reciprocal interference between the
environment and marked (raced/gendered/polluted) corporeality
in the face of landscape’s
harm—mediation—digitization—
withdrawal. Presentations will
address a poetics of systemic crisis, stalking solutions,
obliging recognition of ambient relations of authority and
compromise as compass through a stupefying enormity of damage:
Marcella Durand on race and ecological disaster; Brenda
Iijima on Agnes Denes’s reclamation art; Kathy Westwater on
bodily organization within transmogrifying ‘nature’; Rita Wong
and Linda Sormin on ongoing toxicities.