Installations
Antena Aire built spaces for multilingual conversation, exuberant celebration of books and enthusiastic writing experiences. Antena Aire created spaces for exchange and language experimentation and installed work at numerous sites: Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Hammer Museum, Grand Central Art Center, the Armory Center for the Arts, Pitzer College, and more.
2019 – Antena Aire in Publishing Against the Grain @ Pitzer College
February 2 – March 28, 2019
Organized by the Independent Curators International (ICI), Publishing Against the Grain provided a space for reading, thinking, and conversing, where slowing became a form of intellectual resistance. It encouraged discursive public participation, self-reflective investigation, and invited visitors to discover new perspectives while connecting differing and analogous spheres of contemporary art.
In the context of today’s corporatization and commodification of cultural institutions, and in many political situations where free speech becomes ever more precarious, independent publishing has shown extraordinary vitality and importance as a platform for disseminating alternative, progressive and autonomous positions.
Publishing Against the Grain was an exhibition organized and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and initiated by Alaina Claire Feldman and Becky Nahom, with Sanna Almajedi.
2017 – Antena in Between Words and Silence @ the Armory Center for the Arts
January 29 – April 2, 2017
Prompted by the radical listening that accompanies cross-language practice, language justice and language experimentation collective Antena provided a selection of books from small independent presses from the US and Latin America, focusing on works that incorporate multilingualism and translation. In addition, a series of poets in residence worked in the space, giving writing workshops and engaging the public.
Between Words and Silence: The Work of Translation featured work by Antena, Sid M. Dueñas and Naotaka Hiro, Daniel Guzmán and Luis Felipe Ortega, Federico Gama, Jota Izquierdo, Lorena Mal, Sarah Minter, Gala Porras-Kim, and Clarissa Tossin.
2016 – MultilingüeLAndia: Antena @ Hammer
March 8, 2016 – May 20, 2016
Antena’s residency at the Hammer museum worked with the institution and its visitors to examine their relationships with language and multilingualism. We worked closely with the museum to investigate and foster capacity for language justice through multilingual programs, workshops for staff, and an on-site installation of the AntenaMóvil, a retrofitted Mexican cargo tricycle stocked with multilingual small-press publications and bilingual Libros AntenaBooks.
In addition, Antena installed a series of lightboxes that asked questions of passers-by in the three most spoken non-English languages in the LA metro area.
Key public events included Housing Justice + Language Justice: A Bilingual Exchange, Food Labor Justice + Language Justice: A Bilingual Exchange, and Recycled Languages: Workshop and Reading.
2014 – Antena @ Blaffer Art Museum
January 18 – May 10, 2014
Antena inhabited various spaces of the museum to explore how critical views on language could help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we live in. Antena facilitated a number of initiatives: books for sale from small independent presses and DIY endeavors throughout the U.S. and Latin America showcasing innovative writing by women, people of color, queer communities, and others outside the normative canon; 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; public workshops in writing, bookmaking, translation, and language justice; and, from February 13 – 16, an encuentro (gathering) of Antena’s participating artists, who gave public readings and performances, participated in panel discussions and open conversations, and led workshops and community interventions outside the museum. A schedule of some of those events is available here.
The exhibition featured eleven artists from Houston, the wider U.S. and Latin America: Benvenuto Chavajay (Sololá, Guatemala), Jamal Cyrus (Houston), Maria-Elisa Heg (Houston), Autumn Knight (Houston), Sueyeun Juliette Lee (Philadelphia), Ayanna Jolivet McCloud (Houston), Nuria Montiel (Mexico City), Kaia Sand (Portland), Efraín Velasco (Oaxaca), Cecilia Vicuña (New York/Santiago), and Stalina Villarreal (Houston). This selection of artists was designed to facilitate conversation and collaboration between Houston literary and visual arts communities and practices occurring nationally and internationally.
The exhibition was organized by Amy Powell, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, with Jen Hofer and John Pluecker.
2012 – Antena @ Project Row Houses
March 31 – June 24, 2012
Antena’s first installation took place at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas from March – June 2012 as part of Round 36. Antena @ PRH was a durational performance and a functional space where a range of multilingual literary adventures were activated:
* a bookspace and reading room with hundreds of small-press and DIY publications from autonomous presses in The Americas
* a large collection of books from independent presses featuring innovative work by African-American, Latino and Latin American writers
* a read/write club that met weekly for 10 weeks
* poem-making on manual typewriters and on specially-programmed computers
* ongoing writing and bookmaking exercises
* a documentation pillar where anyone who wished could share the texts they typed
* literary and performance events
* wide-ranging conversations with people who visited the space.
