Within accounts of race, gender, and sexuality, “nature” has often been synonymous with a bogus, essentializing overdetermination, as in the idea of “natural law.” At other moments, nature has been taken as a lush resource for thought, a zone of unpredictable potentiality. Join us for a public workshop with artist and poet manuel arturo abreu on Guyanese writer and theorist Wilson Harris. Harris was trained and worked as a land surveyor, after his stepfather, also a surveyor, disappeared in Guyana’s interior. Harris’s novels, including the Carnival trilogy (1985-1990) and Palace of the Peacock (1960), drew on his empirical knowledge of those grasslands and forests to cultivate a Caribbean philosophy of history and imagination. abreu describes Harris’ work as quantum fiction, writing that Harris “rejected the idea of living Man and dead Nature; he felt the opposite was more like the truth: the ‘perceiving human’ is the dead, and the ‘perceived landscape’ is what is alive.” Given that today's climate crisis challenges us from perceiving the natural environment outside the linear teleology of its accelerating degradation, how can reading Harris now equip us to imagine divergent temporalities of nature, life, and death?

Raised in the Bronx, manuel arturo abreu is a Dominican non-disciplinary artist working with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have lived and worked in Portland, OR since 2009. With Victoria Anne Reis, they co-founded and co-run home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland in its sixth year of genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum.

Participation is open to all, regardless of preparation, but participants are invited, if they find time, to read the texts by Harris linked below, and to bring any writing, photography, drawing, or reflection on the work and themes to share and develop with the group. 

Palace of the Peacock, sections 1 and 2
History, Fable and Myth

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.