Poetry Project 2021 Curatorial Fellowship
The Poetry Project worked with Tierra Narrative members Maryam Ivette Parhizkar and Òscar Moisés Díaz produced a series of events that centered and engaged the archive. These events activated a small library of queer poetics from Guatemala City, invited Salvadoran diaspora writers to respond to archival transnational Salvadoran films, and included a multimedia presentation and conversation with artists and poets on dream transits and the archives of the ancestral.
an evening with Cuirpoétikas and Tierra Narrative
Featuring: Dada Alguien, Rodrigo Arenas-Carter, Marielos Olivo, Fabrizio Quemé, Kenny Rodríguez, and Manuel Tzoc
Based in Guatemala City, Cuirpoétikas is a platform for exchange of artistic and poetic ideas, dialogue and research on sexual dissidence from a queer perspective. Tierra Narrative will collaborate with Cuirpoétikas and invite three Guatemala City poets to share their work, followed by a conversation around queer small press/DIY publishing, poetic lineages, and community history.
archives of Salvadorean cinema with Tierra Narrative
Featuring: Lauri García Dueñas (ES/MX), Raquel Gutierrez (US), and Elena Salamanca (ES)
Tierra Narrative invites three Salvadoran/diaspora poets to write alongside films housed by El Museo de la Palabra y La Imagen in San Salvador–– an institution dedicated to collecting and preserving memories of the Salvadoran civil war. In addition to readings, we will screen these short films: El Gran Debut (1976) by Baltazar Polío in collaboration with Teatro Grupo Independiente and La Zona Intertidal (1980) by collective Los Vagos.
isthmus dream transits with Tierra Narrative
Featuring : Shyanne Figueroa Bennett (US), Edgar García (US), and Wingston Gonzalez (Guatemala)
As an embodiment of dreaming, how can poetry alter our relationships to colonial geographies and their spectral residues? This reading and following conversation (moderated by curatorial fellows) brings together three poets whose works trace alternate cartographies of Central America and the Caribbean through dream-work and re-visions of history, ancestry and time.
Reflections on Movement, Landscape & identity
A film screening and conversation featuring TAB by Matika Hlumela, I'M FREE NOW, YOU ARE FREE by Ash Goh, Ni aquí Ni Allá by Ley Comas, Heaven Reaches Down to Earth by Tebogo Malebogo, Little Sky by Jess X Snow and Ayllu by Charlie Uruchima.
2020 Mutual Aid Series
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have explored ways to use virtual programming as a source of mutual aid and community care, raising more than 10k to support BIPOC and undocumented folk, land defenders, and others affected by systemic violence in the New York metropolitan area, Guatemala and Mexico.
Spirit Level: Sound Therapy with Guadalupe Maravilla
A continuation of Spirit Level, a series of holistic workshops for undocumented immigrants, this iteration focused on using sound therapy as an instrument for communal healing during the initial phases of COVID-19 pandemic. All proceeds went towards BIPOC/Undocumented communities.
Letters to the Land workshop with Mónica Teresa Ortiz
A writing workshop that invited community members to use the epistolary form to channel and develop narratives and discuss ways in which we can translate our relationship to our environment through an expression that is informative and observational. All proceeds went towards Indigenous Kinship Collective New York City.
A reading by NYC Central American Writers
An evening of readings presented by NYC Central American writers including Shyanne Figueroa Bennett, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Ivanna Baranova, Óscar Moisés Diaz, Sheila Maldonado, Javier Zamora and Suzy X. All proceeds went towards Centro Corona.
on returning: diasporic chronologies, appendices, and the present-political
A night of readings from poets/authors; Dalia Elhassan, Asiya Wadud, and Javier Zamora, followed by a conversation moderated by poet/curator/artist Óscar Moisés Diaz.
Drawing from Edwidge Danticat’s “Creating Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work” and Susan Sontag’s idea of the writer as someone who is paying attention, the conversation engages with how these poets are working through temporality in their work, the idea of the appendix in relation to their practices, how returnings and retracings impact diasporic writing, and the poetic response to the present-political.
cine centroamericano: narrativas de migración y desplazamiento
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Tierra Narrative, Casa Comal, and Cine Concepción presented Cine Centroamericano: Narrativas de Migración y Desplazamiento, a screening of four short films on themes of migration and displacement, all produced in the Central American region. The screening was followed by a conversation with the directors: Hawi Naira Castañeda Willca, Carolina Mora and Maria Paula Kikut, Andrés Rodriguez, and Leyzer Chiquin. The co-founder of Tierra Narrative, Génesis Mancheren Abaj moderated the event.