[Event] Booklaunch party in SF! Somatic Engagement

Dear DS-HUMers,
should you find yourself in San Francisco on Thursday December 15th, please join Katherine Sherwood, Georgina Kleege, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, Eleni Stecopoulos and Christian Nagler at the Green Arcade bookstore (1680 Market Street), at 7.30.

Somatic Engagement: the politics, poetics and publics of embodiment. Chain Links books, 2001. 128 pages, 12 color plates, $16, order through Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781930068513/somatic-engagement.aspx)

Edited by community artist, scholar, and dancer Petra Kuppers (author of Disability Culture and Community Performance), the book opens with Arnieville, a Californian protest camp of disability, homelessness, and poverty activists.

From there, a series of enactments welcome trespass and incursion in the name of survival.

Amy Sara Carroll on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS phone that uses poetry to lead the disoriented and thirsty to water caches and safety sites in the US-Mexican borderlands.

Devora Neumark on washing Tali Goodfriend?s hands in Lebanese olive oil outside the hotel where Colin Powell speaks to the Jewish National Fund, hands gliding over one another in the middle of an angry public protest.

Christian Nagler on writing an experimental novel while conducting an oral history of agricultural labor practices and migration patterns at the site of the Panamerican Highway in El Salvador.

Georgina Kleege on touch and blindness as she discusses Katherine Sherwood?s paintings of magic and the human brain, paintings that Sherwood began after her stroke ten years ago.

Eleni Stecopoulos on the healing quest as research and the complexities of cultural appropriation.

Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto on the collaborative connections of breath, body, pause, pain, and form.

Somatic Engagement is an exploration of how relation and support play out in breaths, steps, and touch.


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Petra Kuppers
Associate Professor
English, Art and Design, Theatre, Women's Studies
University of Michigan
435 S. State Street, 3187 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
mobile: 734-239-2634
Artistic Director of The Olimpias, www.olimpias.org

New books!
Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, on Olimpias practices (Palgrave, August 2011, http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=504063)
Somatic Engagement, an edited collection of artists on the poetics, politics and publics of embodiment (Chain Links, October 2011, http://www.chainarts.org/somatic%20engagement.htm)