Space: Lessons in Taking and Making

A Mad Libs–style project contends with poetry from Turtle Island and Palestinian writers and asks: How can you claim space for claiming these [spaces]?

Sourcing from the works of more than twenty Palestinian and Indigenous poets, SPACE: Lessons in Taking and Making brings to light the relationship between reader and writer, person and space. By working through the poems and removing words, first person(s) and place(s) and finally linguistic subjectives such as language, Perry Cox uses the extracted words to create a word list, prompting the reader to fill in the blanks. The process presents theory-through-practice: collaborative and participatory composition methods that rely on intimate forms of engaging with Palestinian and Indigenous poetry writing and storytelling as qualitative research methods themselves.

Do you want to participate? Who and what are you accountable to? Should this be participatory work? At once playful and nostalgic, SPACE: Lessons in Taking and Making asks readers to consider their role in colonialism through their own instances of extraction and displacement.