History

Antena Aire made work together from 2010 through 2020.  For a historical deep dive, read on! And if you want to dive even deeper and ask us questions, feel free to be in touch.

 

2020

We decide to no longer create new work as Antena Aire. Over the last decade, Antena Aire existed beautifully and generatively as a collaborative project of Jen/Eleana Hofer and JD Pluecker. We grew, we labored, we wrote and translated, created performances and installations, organized in communities around language justice principles, and showed up for each other in ways big and small as we worked to create space for ourselves and others to extend our various intersecting practices in imaginative and instigating ways. We spent the past ten years of collaborations exploring and extending the boundaries of what was possible to create together, different from and beyond what either of us could do alone. Many projects and many connections have been possible through Antena Aire, and for that we are grateful.

 

2019

We publish a chapbook with Tripwire in San Francisco entitled The Flame Through the Bridge: Notes and Transcripts from Improvised Interpreted Poem Performances, 2014 – 2019. This little book compiles a photos, poems, texts, video stills, and performance notes from five years of experimenting with a process of producing poems through improvised live consecutive interpretation. We exhibit a variety of cross-language small press publications on the Antenamóvil in the Publishing Against the Grain exhibition at Pitzer College. We make a few public appearances, facilitating a workshop on language justice as social justice at REMAP: LA sponsored by Arts in a Changing America and presenting Myriam Moscona’s book Tela de Sevoya at the Jewish History Museum and our own projects at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, both in Tucson, Arizona.

 

2018

We officially change the name of our collective to Antena Aire to reflect the fact we are one of three sister collectives that coexist horizontally and anti-hierarchically, alongside Antena Houston and Antena Los Ángeles; we debut our new name publicly in a talk at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State. The AntenaMóvil brings cross-language small-press publications to the Mexicali Biennial at Cal State San Bernardino  and the Art@341FSN project in LA’s Little Tokyo. We present our work and debut a new improvised interpreted poem at the Migratory Poetics symposium at the University of California, Irvine, and extend Responder por favor as part of the Mexicali Biennial.

 

2017

Antena co-translates a number of books, including Tela de sevoya – Onioncloth by Mexican writer Myriam Moscona and The Words of Others by Argentinean Artist León Ferrari. Antena creates installation works for “Between Words and Silence: The Work of Translation”at Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California and “Visualizing Language” at the Los Angeles Public Library as part of the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time. We participate in the Migratory Times symposium at the Academia Superior de Artes in Bogotá, Colombia, where we also help to support cross-language conversation, present on our work, and debut our Responder por favor project.

 

2016

At Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum, Antena mounts a large-scale project in the spring that includes an installation of the AntenaMóvil, a new text-based visual piece, bilingual programming around food labor justice and housing justice in collaboration with Antena Los Ángeles and an array of community organizations, and a new Libros Antena Books publication titled 9 recetas & 23 recipes. At the end of the year, Antena produces a cartonera book in conjunction with an array of other autonomous press projects, titled Reciclados Languages リサイクルされた Lenguajes Recycled 言語. Antena received support from the Rauschenberg Foundation SEED grant this year, enabling us to deepen our work in our local cities and reconfigure some of our internal structures.

 

2015

A summer residency at Cannonball in Miami leads to additional co-translating and co-writing, as well as new investigations into cross-language practice. Antena’s language justice at the local level in Los Angeles (where Jen lives) and in Houston (where JP lives) continues to deepen, but now through independent sister collectives specifically focused on that work with local collaborators. Antena attends a first-ever national gathering of language justice advocates and interpreters at the Wayside Center for Popular Education in Virginia. In the fall, Antena presents the illuminated talk, Taco Two Time, at the University of Texas, El Paso; Antena does presentations and performances at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the American Association of Literary Translators in Tucson and the University of Colorado-Boulder.

 

2014

In the spring, Antena is in residence at Blaffer Art Museum on the University of Houston campus. Antena facilitates a number of initiatives: books for sale from small independent presses and DIY endeavors throughout the U.S. and Latin America; an exhibition of work combining literary and visual arts, with artists from Houston and the wider U.S. as well as Chile, Guatemala, and Mexico; a weekly class titled “In The Between: At the Intersections of Writing, Art, Politics,” open to the public and UH students enrolled for credit in the interdisciplinary art minor (IART); public workshops in writing, bookmaking, translation, and language justice; and, from February 13 – 16, an Encuentro of Antena’s participating artists, who give public readings and performances, participate in panel discussions and open conversations, and lead workshops and community interventions outside the museum. In conjunction with the local Houston domestic worker organizing group La Colmena, Libros Antena Books publishes ¡Todos Somos Una! Una mirada hacia la realidad de las trabajadoras del hogar / We Women, One Woman! A View of the Lived Experience of Domestic Workers, an anthology of writings by domestic workers in Houston. We engage in various joint translation projects with Alumnos47 and others. In June, we facilitate a writing workshop in New York City as part of the Writing on It All project. Also in June, JP presents on Antena’s work at the HEMI Encuentro in Montreal. In the fall, Antena performs a new illuminated talk, Taco Two Time, for Gulf Coast in Houston and at Cannonball in Miami.

 

2013

For the first time, Jen and JP get the opportunity to work together in the same place at the same time at the Millay Colony for the Arts where we spend the month of July. There we work on deepening the thinking behind the work of Antena, specifically developing drafts of the three manifestos and two how-to guides that will be featured in our Antena @ Blaffer installation. During the rest of the year, we continue to work on various joint translation projects, including one for Alumnos47 in Mexico City. We begin to enact performative experiments, including one featured on the Floor Journal site. We present about our work at the &Now Festival in Boulder CO, as well as organizing a panel on mulitlingual writing which is simultaneously interpreted in Spanish and English. We continue to work in our local areas as we plan for a large-scale installation at the Blaffer Art Museum for Spring 2014.

 

2012

With Jen living in Los Angeles and JP living in Houston, we begin conceiving of the Southwestern region of the United States and the Northern region of Mexico as a single/multiple zone of possibility for multilingual artistic and activist work; we continue thinking about and experimenting with methods of long-distance collaboration and semi-autonomous projects under the umbrella of Antena. The vision for Antena grows wider as we include our aesthetic practice within our language justice work. We make many to-do lists. From March to June, JP installs a temporary bookstore, reading room and language experimentation lab at Houston’s Project Row Houses. Jen visits Antena during its last two weeks at Project Row Houses to spend time in the Antena space, participate in the Read/Write club and other literary events, and to work together with JP to explore potential for further expansion of Antena’s projects. During the summer, Antena also helped to coordinate language justice for the Mexican Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity.

 

2011

We begin serious conversations about creating a language justice collaborative and decide to purchase simultaneous interpreting equipment together to foster this work. The Babelbox enters our lives. At our first interpreting job as a team, the Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide Conference at UC Riverside in March 2011, we agree to work together on an ongoing language justice project. We take a hike in the hills above Riverside with poet Jen Nellis and immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho to try to come up with a name; we do not find a name. We spend months puzzling over a name that will express some of our ideas around the power of cross-cultural multilingual communication in both Spanish and English (our primary focus languages for now) and eventually land on Antena. At the end of 2011, JP leaves Tijuana and moves back to his native city of Houston, Texas.

 

2006-2010

Jen and JP first meet in 2006 in Tijuana as part of the Writing Lab on the Border, a cross-border experiment in writing. This begins a friendship and occasional correspondence. In 2010, we work closely together on the Language Access Team at the US Social Forum in Detroit and start to dream of ways to extend our language justice work. In the same year, we begin spending more time together in our respective cities, Los Angeles and Tijuana.