About
In 2023, the Lit & Luz Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary, bringing together artists and writers from Mexico City and Chicago to collaborate on multilingual presentations for its live magazine show. Maricela and I were paired for this exciting event, and from our first meeting, we felt an immediate connection and a shared wavelength.
The festival is renowned for pairing visual artists and writers from both cities to foster friendships and cross-cultural experiences. When we were invited to perform, I was thrilled to be paired with Maricela, as our intuition aligned beautifully. We decided to collaborate on every aspect of the performance, starting with writing 10 poems about things that flow. We each selected 10 words and, using only those 20 words, wrote the first drafts of the poems. We then used the titles as guides for how many lines each poem should have, adding additional words as needed. It’s important to note this structural and process-oriented collaborative approach and that the poems were first fully written in Spanish.
With the poems completed, we began working on the performance. The poems needed to be translated so that non-Spanish speakers could understand them. While the Lit & Luz Festival staff asked Ryan and Claudia to translate the poems, Maricela and I focused on how to make the poems flow in the performance, and how to perform them for a multilingual audience. We wanted the language to be fluid, not just a straightforward translation, but translating them would have meant losing some of the structural elements of the Spanish version. Reciting the poems in Spanish and then in English had us switching instead of flowing.
For our performance, we embraced the idea of things that flow, which had informed our project from the beginning. To flow between language and experiences, we decided to create a Spanglish version of the poems. We wanted the experience of the performance and poems to remain untranslated, to exist in multiple languages at once, unapologetically. Our performance score included walking through the audience, peeling fruit, mirroring movements, sitting at a table, sharing fruit, putting on makeup, exchanging friendship bracelets, and reading the poems, the audience is invited to read the first and last poem (the audience and readers are the +1).
bios
Bios
Flor a Flores is a transdisciplinary artist and poet whose creative works revolve around the concept of queer belongings. Some themes in their works include flowers as a symbol for self (Flor), Kiki – a queer monarch butterfly that enjoys going to the discotheque, and “X” – an Epic poem about the letter X, exploring its significance in Latinx identity and its other uses as a gesture of erasure, inclusion, voidance, and a placeholder for a language that is yet to come.
They recently exhibited at Everybody & Good Naked Gallery and have been featured in reviews and publications such as Artmaze, Sixty Inches From Center, New American Paintings, and Newcity Art. They are an editor at Kiki Club Editions and recently published “Kiki: A Sky of Changing Lights”
Maricela Guerrero (Mexico City, 1977), poet, writer and teacher. She writes on how to restore our relation to the environment from urban spaces. She also designs and facilitates workshops that combine writing, mindfulness and meditations to find better ways to inhabit this world. She is the author of nine poetry collections: El sueño de toda célula (Ediciones Antílope/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, Mexico City, 2018, Clemencia Isaura Prize in 2018); Kilimanjaro, translated by Stalina Villareal (Cardboard House Press, 2018), and The dream of Every Cell, translated by Robin Myers in 2022. Guerrero has been a fellow of the prestigious National System of Artists in Mexico. Her work has been translated into German, Swedish, and French.
Ryan Greene (b. 1994) is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He’s a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include work by Claudina Domingo, Elena Salamanca, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore. Like Collier, the ground he stands on is not his ground.
Claudia Nuñez de Ibieta is a bookseller and Spanish/English interpreter and translator. She is also interested in book-making and is a member of the Phoenix Cartonera Collective. She has lived in Los Angeles CA, Santiago Chile, and Tempe AZ.
