Antena: Jen Hofer and John Pluecker: September 27, 2018

Steve Dickison welcomes Antena: a language justice and language experimentation collaborative, and introduces David Buuck, who offers opening remarks on the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series. Jen Hofer and John Pluecker introduce Antena's aesthetic practices, critical intentions, and community work, and invite the audience to participate in the reading by choosing phrases from a projection through which Hofer and Pluecker exchange monologues inspired by these phrases. From the phrase "el desgaste, desgarre, guerras" Pluecker reads the introduction of a work titled Dystopia Diaspora. In response to the phrase "the goat helps the child dolphin stretch" Pluecker speaks on ideas of mentorship and training as well as experiences in creating vehicles of practice across the U.S. South, while Hofer discusses the intentions of the term "language justice" and its origins from the Highlander Research and Education Center. With the phrase "insiste la ruina" Pluecker reflects on the digital ruins created by use of social media, while Hofer speaks of the importance of the language worker in social organizing contexts and cultural institutions, discussing a prior installation by Antena at the University of Houston's Blaffer Art Museum. The phrase "questions will fill" draws attention to the handout titled "responder por favor," passed to the audience prior to the reading, as part of a larger experiment in participatory research, with an invitation for the audience to complete and return the handout for a future Antena project. The phrase "Levity! Levity!" is followed by both Pluecker and Hofer reading from an ongoing project titled "Taco Two Time." The final phrase "feeling the minor sensations as major" is paired with a screening of a video describing Antena's installation at the Blaffer Art Museum. Hofer then introduces the differences between simultaneous and consecutive translating, and Pluecker and Hofer improvise an interpretative poem using June Jordan's Naming Our Destiny and Libros Antena's RECLICLADOS LANGUAGES.

Antena, Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, take questions from the audience, discussing their work at the Blaffer Art Museum, in Houston, to offer a platform to local Houston artists and community members. They talk about the quandary of using Spanish and English as part of social justice work even though both are regarded as colonizing languages. Pluecker remarks on the place of indigenous and Afro-diasporic languages in social and language justice circles, noting that there cannot be language justice without racial justice. Hofer comments on the importance of explicitly acknowledging the dominance of certain languages and using the products of oppression against the colonizer to ultimately unsettle their dominance. They discuss the history of the Highlander Center and its place in social justice work. They are then asked about code switching in creative work and the struggle of maintaining cohesion while staying true to the languages in use. Hofer remarks on the multiple kinds of comprehension that can be accessed in creative work, predicated on how the work is meant to function. Hofer and Pluecker then detail their experience in translating Mexican poet Myriam Moscona's Tela de sevoya / Onioncloth (Les Figues Press, 2012), written in Spanish and untranslated Ladino. The evening ends with Pluecker and Hofer discussing upcoming projects.