Co-Prosperity
3219-21 S Morgan St,
Chicago, IL 60608
Door 6:15 PM / Show 6:45 PM CDT
We are pleased to announce Zones of Purer Doubt, an LGBTQ Solidarity Fundraiser for Palestine on Saturday, July 20, 2024 at Co-Prosperity. Media artists, poets, and performers Ava Aviva Avnisan, Emrys Merlin Brandt, Noa Fields, Judd Morrissey, and Doug Rosman will present an evening of programming to raise money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund charity.
Based on Avnisan’s experience of being born in Jerusalem; born a girl in a boy’s body; and born to a European, Jewish-American father and an Arab, Jewish-Israeli mother, Specters of Home—Prologue, created in collaboration with Doug Rosman, is a short film that weaves memoir together with speculative fiction to grapple with the entangled ideologies of Zionism and the gender binary. Making use of a range of visual materials including archival footage and generative AI animations, the film invites viewers to meditate on the ways in which history’s past, present, and future ghosts call on us to heal intergenerational trauma by reinterpreting dominant narratives and challenging internalized ideologies in the service of a collective future founded on a shared vision of justice and solidarity.
Morrissey and Avnisan’s The Zone of Pure Doubt is an ongoing multimodal project with elements of poetry, augmented reality, and musical performance that explores memory, obsolescence, gender, and time-travel. The Zone references an area of the pacific where the correct timing of the Jewish sabbath cannot be agreed upon using any of the traditional rules applied to account for the loss and gain of hours across regions of global time-keeping. The Zone is imagined as a longitudinal slide of restlessness, a theoretical area where to rest is always to wrest, to wrestle with past selves and their mythologies as well as larger histories of indigenous knowledge and colonial violence.
Fields will read selected poems from her poetry manuscript in progress E, which is forthcoming from Nightboat Books next year. The poems are attuned to a politics of listening, by way of mishearing.
Brandt and Rosman’s Alternate Root explores overly-charted digital spaces as a mechanism for responding to a crisis of communication. Activating physical space with real-time computer vision and generative AI processes, they (mis)use digital pathing signifiers as a brush to perform a speculative pathmaking, disrupting traditional ways of mapping, routing, and navigation.
Publications by Avnisan and Fields will be sold in conjunction with the performances. 100% of proceeds will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) to support the medical and humanitarian needs of Palestinian children.
This hybrid event will be live-streamed on https://lumpentv.org/. If you have inquiries or are requesting a media kit, please reach out to Ava Aviva Avnisan (ava.avnisan@gmail.com), Judd Morrissey (porousjud@gmail.com), and Gordon Fung (gfung@saic.edu).
