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Lab short abstract

We invite a group of 10 (max) participants to roam the campus of AMU on an open-ended poetry walk, centering experiences of wonder and confusion. Through a series of playful prompts linked to movement, observation, and self-reflection, participants will compose poems in pieces.

Lab long abstract

​​“Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability. It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.” - Fanny Howe

In this Lab, we invite a group of 10 (maximum) participants to roam the campus of Adam Mickiewicz University on a poetry walk. Through a series of playful prompts linked to movement, observation, and self-reflection, participants will compose poems in pieces. Bringing together poetry and the spirit of ethnographic observation, we will draw on poet Fanny Howe’s “Bewilderment” and Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s writing on astonishment. We encourage participants to roam around in a state of wonder and confusion.

This Lab contends that wonder and confusion are generative not only for the practice of ethnography but for our ethical-political becoming per se. Virtually unimpeded flows of global capital and media forms often give a sense of a world that is already known and grasped. This Lab aims to cultivate gestures that keep us from readily acquiescing to such closures. An appreciation of bewilderment is important not only in our encounters with ethnographic elsewheres. Even what we take to be "here” and properly "ours" has its solidity only because it is an accumulation, a refrain — "a rutting by scoring over," as Kathleen Stewart puts it. Therefore, we need new habits to attend to such "nameable clarities" in fresh ways.

After the walk and self-reflection, participants will gather together to playfully collage their writing, guided by an additional series of prompts.