As part of Space/Place/Environment, Xpace is pleased to announce 🌳ALL THE BIRDS WE HEAR IN TREES BUT NEVER SEE 🍃a site-symbiotic rehearsed poetry performance featuring the poets Sanna Wani and Elizabeth Mudenyo, and hosted by EJ Kneifel. 

This project is part of EJ Kneifel’s research, which explores ekphrasis, language that strums the gap between the visual and the linguistic, as a model for a kind of movement that can be found across all life. Humming with the resonance of a child’s first loss in their differentiation from their environment, of a person’s first encounter with themself through the possibility of an object, ekphrasis distills the ankle of memory, ultimately scaffolding to the hope of a meeting point. 

The performance features melody and poetry emerging from memories of mothers, the Space/Place/Environment exhibition, and the ekphrasis of knowing each other. In other words, what ekphrasis, ultimately, is meant for: to go through the memory of the description towards each other. To hum the song of what we cannot see, in order, together, to look.

There will be two performances on March 16th: 

1 PM (mask mandatory) and 5 PM.

Poster by @nikoctober 

Image description: A poster with red and black watercolour letters lists the event information: two performances on March 16th at 1 PM and 5 PM at Xpace Cultural Centre. Around the text are watercolour pears with shadows of various shapes, some of which look like they are moving, some of which look like birds.

Bios:

Sanna Wani is the author of My Grief, The Sun (House of Anansi, 2022) which won the 2023 Trillium Poetry Prize. She is a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective. She loves daisies. (@sannawani)

Elizabeth Mudenyo is a Scarborough-based poet, community-engaged artist and arts manager. Elizabeth is a fellow of The Watering Hole and the Poetry Incubator, and a participant of the Hurston/Wright Poetry Weekend with Danez Smith and Diaspora Dialogues Short Form Mentorship with Olive Senior. Her work has appeared in Write Magazine, Arc Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, CV2, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, With Both Hands, was published through Anstruther Press. She is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

EJ Kneifel is a psycholinguist, multidisciplinary facilitator, poet-critic, friend of a friend. Their ekphrasis — spanning music, literature, tv/film, and visual art — has appeared regularly at Exclaim!, Adroit, Montreal Review of Books, PRISM International, and more. Their poetry has appeared at Canthius, Peach Mag, Hobart, LESTE, The Malahat Review, ARC, TIMBER, Bad Dog, Vallum, and more. They are a film columnist at In the Mood Magazine, author of the chapbook VIO-LETS (Anstruther Press 2023), co-creator of the collective poetry podcast, CATCH, web series, PLAYD8s, and movement-based theatre production, ORANGING. They are always writing to someone. Right now they are writing to T. (@ejkneifel)