Vicuña

Driskill

“What form of awareness do we need to turn around the destruction of the world?” asks poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña, Cornell’s 2015 Messenger Lecturer. “How can art and poetry become a force in the quest to create a new ecological sensibility based on our connectivity to the living world?”

Cornell’s Department of Anthropology will host three performance lectures, including two by Vicuña, as part of “Poetic Performances From the Fringe.” All three events will be held in the Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Vicuña will perform “The Poem Is the Animal” April 28 at 4:45 p.m. and “Awareness Is the Art: Artists for Democracy and Other Stories” May 2 at 7 p.m. Writer, scholar and performer Qwo-Li Driskill will present “Shaking Our Shells: Cherokee Two-Spirit Lives” May 1 at 7 p.m. A reception will be held in Room 320 at the Schwartz Center following Vicuña’s May 2 performance. All events are free and open to the public.

Born in Chile, Vicuña is an artist and poet of indigenous and Basque lineage. The author of 20 poetry books, she also is a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. In her multilingual oral performances, she weaves people and languages into an incantatory communal song. In “The Poem Is the Animal,” Vicuña will retrace the origin of her poetic chants to the animal sounds and the ancient indigenous languages and philosophies of the Andes. In “Awareness Is the Art: Artists for Democracy and Other Stories,” she will recount her co-founding of this collective movement in London in 1974 in response to the military coup in Chile, and her ongoing work on the glaciers and water scarcity.

Driskill is a (non-citizen) Cherokee Two-Spirit scholar, educator, activist and performer also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee and Osage descent. The author of “Walking With Ghosts: Poems” and co-editor of “Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature,” Driskill is an assistant professor of queer studies in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University.

In addition to the public performances, Vicuña and Driskill will host workshops for students. Vicuña’s “Poetry & Performance,” April 29, will share some of the generative methods on which improvisational, collective and individual poetic performances are based. Driskill’s “Unsettling Performance: Decolonization, Gender and Sexuality,” May 2, will use interactive theater and group discussion to examine the entwined relationships between settler colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia and imagine tactics of resistance for decolonial futures. Space is limited and registration is required for both workshops. Email ek61@cornell.edu to learn more.

The events are co-sponsored by the Messenger Lecture Program; Department of Anthropology; Department of Performing and Media Arts; the American Indian Program; and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies.

Liz Kirk is communications, grant funding and events coordinator for the Department of Anthropology.