FOUR WORKS by Jennifer Scappettone

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STATEMENT

These pieces come from a work in progress called Exit 43, conceived of as an archaeology of the Superfundament and opera of pop-up choruses—a response to the fallout of industry in localized bodies, including those of my family and neighbors, present and past. These particular “pop-ups” were written not in the wake of the Gulf spill, but before—in pre-election delirium, when speculation was exposing itself as such yet an Alaskan had just begun to enchant the US political landscape with her drilling dreams. They are more chilling to me now, then, because they are not descriptive, but grim portents before the blast of what is only the latest in a series of programmed disasters, in the context of deterritorialized “production” that is always, finally, localizable, and always attritional.

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Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and most recently put together Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, which also features new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian. She is at work on a book/installation of toxic pop-ups called Exit 43 for Atelos Press. Over the past year, she has been collaborating with choreographer Kathy Westwater and architect Seung Jae Lee on a site-responsive performance called PARK, which draws upon these pop-ups as scores, and was presented at Dance Theater Workshop and Freshkills Park in New York City earlier in 2010. A manuscript of translations from the Italian of Amelia Rosselli and a critical study of the obsolescent city of Venice within modernity are in their final phases. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. More writing can be found at http://oikost.com.