For Amsterdam Art Week’s West Night, If I Can’t Dance is thrilled to host the second day of horseshoe to heart / togethers in motion, a performance programme by Voice as Landscape.

 

After an evening at Stichting Perdu on 23 May, the programme unfolds into a day-long gathering — an invitation to experience the different materialisations of time in daily life through eating, shifts in light, mood, and place.

 

The programme begins in the afternoon at Emmaplein with an offering of food by Kaixin Chen and Sankrit Kulmanochawong, followed by a guided collective siesta by artist Aitana Cordero. The gathering then gently moves to the WG-terrain for artists María Jerez and Élan D’Orphium’s imaginaries of inter-species communication. With the change of light, the programme enters the If I Can’t Dance theater for a dance performance by artist duo Kike García and Jesús Bravo, and culminates with a concert by artist, musician and composer Phantom Wizard.

 

Voice as Landscape is a performance platform focused on the relationships between body, vibration and territory. It is also an editorial line at Perdu, where it explores poetic experimentation beyond verbal language and into other fields. Voice as Landscape is initiated and curated by Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade. This year, Voice as Landscape is working with the notion of ‘correspondence’, both as a theme and as methodology.

 

Programme*:

16:30 Gather at Emmaplein

17:00 Dinner with Kaixin Chen and Sankrit Kulmanochawong

19:00 La Siesta with Aitana Cordero

20:00 Gather at old plane tree in front of If I Can’t Dance, WG-Plein 881

20:15 Reclamos with María Jerez and Élan D´Orphium

21:00 Paisaje Tres with Kike García and Jesús Bravo at If I Can’t Dance theatre

22:00 Phantom Wizard at If I Can’t Dance theatre, WG-Plein 881

 

*Subject to change. Final programme will be communicated to participants via email.

 

With Kaixin Chen & Sankrit Kulmanochawong, Aitana Cordero, Kike García & Jesús Bravo, María Jerez & Élan D´Orphium, Phantom Wizard

 

Curated by Voice as Landscape

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Acknowledgements

Emmaplein, WG-Plein & If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam

(meeting point at Emmaplein at 16:30hr)

 

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We kick off our programme for the Amsterdam Art Week with a special evening featuring poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, who will give a preview presentation of her forthcoming publication Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, September 2025). Following a reading from the book, Scappettone will be in conversation with fellow poet Mia You and If I Can’t Dance curator Sara Giannini.

 

Coalescing two decades of research, the book uncovers a stateless, polyglot poetry of resistance—the poetry of motherless tongues. Raised within or in the wake of fascism, authors who write this poetry occupy languages without a perceived birthright or sanctioned education; they compose in ecstatic “orphan tongues” that rebuff nationalist ideologies as well as globalization, uprooting notions of belonging ensconced in nativist metaphors of milk, blood, and soil.

 

Studying experiments between languages by immigrant, refugee, and otherwise stateless authors—from Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, Etel Adnan, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Chika Sagawa, and Sawako Nakayasu—Scappettone explores how these poets practice strategic forms of literary and linguistic barbarism, proposing modes of collectivity that exceed geopolitical definitions.

 

Jennifer Scappettone is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia, 2014) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly and The Republic of Exit 43. She is also the translator of Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli.

 

Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2024) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.