R E L E A S E ○ L A U N C H ○ O P E N
29 February – 10 March
龍馬 LOONG MAH
210 Canal Street #401, New York
Opening Reception: Thursday, 29 February 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Live performance by 人間漂流 Tao HO with 瞿暢 QU Chang and 葉慧 YE Hui at 7:00 pm
Screening: Tuesday, 5 March from 7:00 pm
GIORNO POETRY SYSTEMS
222 Bowery, New York
I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against
our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest
the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or
defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to
ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy:
the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There
are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the
images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the
broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for
emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.
May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future—may it bring words
we don’t know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed
could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we
be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone.
Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible.
Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.– Bayo AKOMOLAFE,
“Why I Sang in the Dungeons: A Prophecy to End the Year 2023”
Dear Reader,
We find ourselves in the predicament of being well aware of certain accepted models and frameworks for distribution, presentation, and megaphone-shaped expression (press release, book launch, opening), yet have lost track, lost sight of, and become lost within the ‘loneliness of the project’ [1]—unsure of how to relay this information, perhaps merely a sentiment, to you. The book Elaine edited and published emerged in the early autumn of 2023, and has since found itself in the shy, awkward hesitations of not knowing how and to where it should go. In all honesty, there is a certain resistance to locating words. If the thing had already departed per se, would it not be better to leave its picking up to chance stumblers and otherwise hunters?
But then, there they are. Release, launch, open. Cici sent Dr. Akomolafe’s text to Elaine over the cusp of the new year, and it felt poignant to read him not simply out of mourning for these last years since 2019, when he first wrote the paragraphs quoted above and when we precariously rode a high tide of solidarity for something as yet which dastardly crashed into most likely never. Suddenly dilated from the navel of 2023 towards our collective ‘decade of the fugitive’, distance gives us a safer space from which to speak at the same time old incursions reignite new urgencies that demand our demurring. How quiet may our protest be? If we left Hong Kong in
order to find our voices again, Dear Reader manifests the trajectory of the departed arrow, for acknowledging mat el-kalam—that ‘words have died’ [2] and may now live again through other terms to describe the conditions that beset us, for asking how are you and hope this finds you well and in solidarity across forever time and folded distance. In this breath of this release, launch, and open hosted by Loong Mah and Giorno Poetry Systems, works expanding from initial contributions to Acts of Departure: Dispatches from The Last Emporium are presented by:
Noor ABED نور عابد
陳巧真 CHAN Hau Chun
陳嘉璐 CHEN Jialu + 弗赖德 Fred LAI
Jaime CHU
Nihaal FAIZAL
Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers
胡嘉岷 HU Jiamin + 伍勤 WU Qin
Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA + Isabelle SULLY
Maha MAAMOUN مها مأمون
Mukaddas MIJIT
莫小菲 Xiaofei MO + 武雨濛 Cici WU
瞿暢 QU Chang / 葉慧 YE Hui + 人間漂流 Tao HO
RYBN.ORG
Rahul Subhash SHINDE
閒逛者小報 Tabloid Flaneur
尹景輝 Fai WAN
Bungee Space
Seemingly disparate, these are movements across home and land, traversing heart and context to, at their most simply, consider the form of address. Like letters and other minor dispatches passed quietly from one hand to another under light of sun and moon, they are for our fugitivity, bearing routes and pathways within their being.
Yours Sincerely,
何穎雅 Elaine W. HO + 武雨濛 Cici WU