Vahni Capildeo is a writer and editor. Their work ranges from book-length poems to experiments with performance. Their work explores voices, landscapes and movement between languages, cultures and places. Simone Forti is a dancer, artist and writer. Her work ranges from open choreographic systems to drawing. She uses improvisational techniques to explore everyday gestures, technologies and animality. Together, they discussed the cultural histories of collaboration, instruction, translation and recording they adapt.

Each Public Event was an open conversation. So we could start those conversations with some shared understanding of how each speaker has explored the cross-overs between sculpture and poetry in relation to their event's topic, we asked them to suggest a recent project for preparatory watching/reading/listening.

Simone Forti suggested Song of the Vowels, a performance from 2012 made in response to a public sculpture of the same name by Jacques Lipchitz. This performance exemplifies a number of Forti's signature techniques: an improvised response to a specific point of reference, which combines movement and language at the limits of speech:

Lipchitz's Cubist statue stands on the grounds of the University of California in Los Angles, where Forti now lives. The following video of the sculpture was shot for context by Jason Underhill:

Vahni Capildeo suggested two examples from an ongoing series of video-readings, which they began making during the pandemic. Split into two parallel strands, Fire and Water, these video-readings use makeshift techniques to capture Capildeo's voice reciting a poem while their phone’s camera stares at an object or aperture that obscures our vision.

The first example shared is Fire III, which features 'Erasure as Shinethrough’ from their latest book, Like a Tree Walking (Carcanet, 2021):

The second example is Water III, which features 'Spindrift Silences’ from their pamphlet, Odyssey Calling (Sad Press, 2020):