RSVP here for this rescheduled Dec 7 workshop.
Please register again at the link above if you had a seat for the original Nov 12 date.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Join us at The 8th Floor on Saturday, December 7 from 2-4pm (rescheduled from Nov 12) for When Fred Moten asks “Is there an underground railroad in the sentence?”: an experimental writing workshop led by Scrawlspace artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed. This workshop, first incubated as a 10-week course entitled Wayward Sentences at the School for Poetic Computation, will foreground constraint, play, and collaboration as methods to generate more feral and intuitive writing.
The workshop is limited to 25 participants who should be eager for deep engagement with a range of proposals and methods, and will likely return home with new collaborative texts, maybe even a zine. This program is offered as part of Rasheed’s new initiative The Little Octopus School, a roving school for radical play and improvisation. This workshop explores the erotics of constraint – or the pleasure of having something withheld – a letter, a syntax, a structure, a method. Learners are invited to design gentle scores to generate new writing for future selves and writers alongside play with existing prompts.
RSVPs are required, and should you no longer be able to join, please cancel to give your seat to someone else. Rasheed has asked for participants to bring a sentence you have written, or one you find particularly compelling. You should also have your own laptop or notebook to write with, though we will have some backup supplies.
Info on accessing our space can be found here. Email us with any questions.
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants - Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists' books: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.
Image description: A scratchy light blue surface that fades into black in the upper corners. Two text cut-outs sit on top near the center: “Black people want” / “(…) irony”.