- 2021 Workshop Schedule
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- February 2021: The Languages of Elsewhere w/ Karolina Zapal
February 2021: The Languages of Elsewhere w/ Karolina Zapal
In this workshop, we will play with language and translation while contemplating what it means to be a tourist and how one can approach a journey with a critical eye, to minimize inequity and ignorance and grow as an individual. We will think of our time in transit as a dance: is the choreography fixed? How can we “other” the choreography? And how can we transport ourselves while remaining still? We will ask where the lines lie between local, expat, and tourist, and how we can blend them. Are we different people in different languages and places? How does tourism show up on the body? What does it mean to love and care for someone across physical or emotional distance? And how do travelers’ wishes align (or misalign) with those of locals?
Our driving nouns will be nostalgia, dislocation, critical tourism, borders, and language. We will engage in prompt-based experiential work to create boldly. We will also look at artist residencies and how they can provide time, space, and resources to work while facilitating cultural exchange. Join me for a month of traveling in place. No experience with other languages necessary, just the openness to experiment, collaborate, and play. See you elsewhere!
Materials: Pen, paper, and any art materials you'd like to work with.
Bio:
Karolina Zapal is an itinerant poet, essayist, translator, and author of two books: Notes for Mid-Birth (Inside the Castle, 2019) and Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). As an immigrant and activist writer, she writes frequently about her native Poland, languages, borders, and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Rumpus, Inverted Syntax, Tupelo Quarterly, The Seventh Wave, Mantis, Posit, and others. She has completed three artist residencies: Greywood Arts in Killeagh, Ireland; Brashnar Creative Project in Skopje, Macedonia; and Bridge Guard in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She works at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts & Humanities.
Logistics:
- This workshop runs from February 1, 2021 - February 28, 2021.
- Workshops consist of one video per week for each week in the month. Videos are 45-60 minutes long, and are shared on a private YouTube account.
- Class discussions are held via Slack.
- All readings, creative prompts, and shared artwork will be exchanged via a private Google Drive folder.
- All workshops are designed for you. Dedicate as much or as little time to the workshop per week as you'd like.
- This workshop is taught in English, but collective.aporia offers subtitles for the workshop videos in over 60 languages. If you have questions about language accommodations, please feel free to email us at [email protected].
Donations:
Collective.aporia believes in paying working artists fairly for their time and work. As a diverse international collective, we also believe strongly in valuing fair exchange—whether that be monetary, energetic, or otherwise.
Because of these beliefs, our workshop donations all begin at a $40 base rate with the option to give additional donation amounts, if you’re able. Seventy percent of the donations go to facilitator, and the remainder goes back into collective.aporia for operational expenses.
Participants also have the option to donate money towards the community scholarship, which provides opportunities to folks from these communities to attend workshops at no cost.
Please check out this page to learn more and/or apply for the scholarship.
We understand that not everyone has the financial means to donate $40. In the spirit of collaboration and exchange, we have developed a work exchange initiative that allows folks to choose what kind of work they would like to trade for free entry into the workshop. Examples of this work include writing blog posts, creating and sharing social media content, editing video subtitles, etc.
Thank you for your generosity!
[Image credit: Original photography by Karolina Zapal | Collage by Shawnie Hamer]