Poetry for Strangers: Exquisite Corpse (In Progress)
Organized and Curated by Martin Krafft
Exquisite Corpse: a method of assembling words or images, created by the Surrealists as a parlor game, in which each participant sees only a part of the whole of what is being collectively created, often a drawing. The name pays playful homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The method finds precarious beauty in the only partially known fusing of images or ideas. It values the unexpected, the seemingly incongruous, eschewing the importance of congruency in the first place. Developed by the Surrealists in response to times as tumultuous as the ones we find ourselves in, Exquisite Corpse offers a way of being that enables us to piece together disparate parts of our reality, to value play, spontaneity.
Poetry for Strangers: Exquisite Corpse extends the project, Poetry for Strangers, in which I spent three months reciting a Rilke poem 1,000 times to strangers throughout Berlin while as a resident at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistics. In that spirit of unexpected interactions between strangers, I propose a weaving together of creations. I will start by sharing with two participants the video essay that I created in response to my project in Berlin, which contains within it a recitation of Joana Macy and Anita Burrows’s English translation of Rilke’s poem from The Book of Hours. An assemblage of painters, dancers, video artists, poets, and musicians will respond to the work immediately preceding them, creating a double helix in response to the response to the poem. These creations can be impromptu, sketched, tapping into the subconscious, free. Once the project has reached ten participants, we will gather together at an art space in Luneburg to share our work and fellowship with a dinner that I will prepare.
In this case, the Exquisite Corpse is not a drawing being created. The whole is something more diffuse, more entwined. The Corpse is the assemblage of works and the community that is created around the work, spontaneous community in a time of existential threats. As our species faces death, the Exquisite Corpse is in fact an embrace of death, not death as void, but death as compost. Yes, we are already dead, all of us, our species, our civilization. Our dreams, a last, exquisite exhale. Let beauty grow from our beautiful, rotting corpses.