Generative Workshop: Homing, Nesting, and Ritual for a World-Building Writing Practice | A LAB^4 event | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

Generative Workshop: Homing, Nesting, and Ritual for a World-Building Writing Practice | A LAB^4 event

Arts + Literature Laboratory and the LAB^4 community curation team welcome poet and multimedia artist Vidhu Aggarwal for a generative workshop, Homing, Nesting, and Ritual for a World-Building Wrtiing Practice on Tuesday, July 22 at 7:00pm in the first floor Performance Gallery. Free admission pre-registration (optional but preferred) at hisawyer.com.

Where do you locate yourself and what do you live with? We’re inviting participants to explore an experiment in creative writing for an embodied practice, tying together concepts of self with carried objects by constructing a home among others through a nesting ritual. Sit with us to mix sticks with purse trinkets, debris, leavings. Scrap together different ideas of home to build a nest in our shared space. Practice world-building in your writing, and reveal what comes to you.

This worldbuilding practice is an experiment with how we might imagine our relationship with private domestic space and public space.  We will create a provisional community and name it together. When birds make nests they use debris and other objects in their environment.  Our endeavor is to reimagine accidental objects and place them in relationship to each other–home them and rename them.  This improvisational artmaking practice will lead to a generative writing practice, where we will pull together scraps and fragments of writing and reshape them.  Participants will be able to take parts of their individual writing and collaborate in a group performance resembling bird calls.  

While we will ask participants to use what they have on hand to build their nests, we will provide an array of “stuff” in the environment of the space that they can use.  We will project a looping video to create an immersive experience/environment.

Register here (optional but prefered).

Author with glasses and red background

Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building in multiple platforms: visual poetry, video, and graphic media. Her poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic deformity as an avatar of the racialized global body. In the multiple versions of the book Daughter Isotope, she engages in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborative process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of Literature at Rollins College.

LAB^4 community curatorial projects are made possible by a grant from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

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