WILDPLASSEN
by dove / Chris Kirubi
dove / Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN is a finely-wrought debut collection. The weather surrounds, as subjectivity is carefully interrogated through typographic gesture and image. Thinking with Sembéne, Glissant, Nourbese Philip and others, we are ushered into a space of translation and study reflecting on dispossession, native informants and racial categorisation. "Wildplassen" is a legal term for public urination in which wildness is invoked as an inappropriate occupation of public (urban) space. This collection transfigures the borders of air, city and landscape; language, lyric and page with instability and waywardness.
by dove / Chris Kirubi
dove / Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN is a finely-wrought debut collection. The weather surrounds, as subjectivity is carefully interrogated through typographic gesture and image. Thinking with Sembéne, Glissant, Nourbese Philip and others, we are ushered into a space of translation and study reflecting on dispossession, native informants and racial categorisation. "Wildplassen" is a legal term for public urination in which wildness is invoked as an inappropriate occupation of public (urban) space. This collection transfigures the borders of air, city and landscape; language, lyric and page with instability and waywardness.
by dove / Chris Kirubi
dove / Chris Kirubi's WILDPLASSEN is a finely-wrought debut collection. The weather surrounds, as subjectivity is carefully interrogated through typographic gesture and image. Thinking with Sembéne, Glissant, Nourbese Philip and others, we are ushered into a space of translation and study reflecting on dispossession, native informants and racial categorisation. "Wildplassen" is a legal term for public urination in which wildness is invoked as an inappropriate occupation of public (urban) space. This collection transfigures the borders of air, city and landscape; language, lyric and page with instability and waywardness.
ISBN: 9781068644603
78 pages
Date published: 12/10/2024
Paperback
For Fans of: Victoria Adukwei-Bulley, Dionne Brand, Momtaza Mehri
WILDPLASSEN by Dove/Chris Kirubi is a wondrous book. The pages shake, an attribute of syntax that resembles brownian motion. Just as "colour bleeds right through", so does this: a capacity to "tremble" that's both somatic and formal, an improvised set of notations. In fact, kirubi extends the intergenre proposition of the collection itself to emanate "gliss.notes", fragments and lines "transcribed...while attempting to translate," a "flickering close-up of flowers", and so on. This is a stunning and moving work from the verges of poetry, performance and visual art. — Bhanu Kapil
After the rain, Chris Kirubi’s WILDPLASSEN meets us in the street, as all the mundane elements of the day world begin to glisten: light diffracting in the damp sheen upon the tarmac, pavements, railings, rainbows appearing in puddles. This poetry encourages us to loiter, or to walk intentionally at the slowest pace in the opposite direction to what racial capitalism would want of us. Only then emerge the small intimacies that Kirubi is attuned to, in the correspondences between sounds, syllables, plants. Their writing forages a quiet philosophy for the page. Pirouettes of emotion --- from this everyday enchantment, to anxiety and grief --- “encourage the recovery of all dreams”. Come, pluck up your velveteen ears from beneath your raincoat, and remember to wash your hands. — Nat Raha
dove dares displace the comfort of I / eye, spills her participatory cinema. Let it then: leaking out humble percussive, making mess of order. Welcome this stray of song and rabid dance. Listening strategies for the noise of now. Fervent squeeze of subscript riddles, ooze on an out. And what grows of it! Tender and green. Marvellous to sit in the drench of this collection. —S*an D. Henry-Smith
dove / Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London. Recent projects and performances include The Archive is a Gathering Place at Tate Britain in collaboration with Rhoda Boateng, The Blue House co-founded with Daniel Baker-Wells, and a collaborative improvisation at Décalé with (petals) Petero Kalulé. Recent commissioned texts include Fabulous Musics published in response to Shenece Oretha's UAL 20/20 commission with Hepworth Wakefield and a note on audrey mbugua's dog published in the Jerwood Survey III catalogue in response to Ebun Sodipo's work. They are a lecturer at Slade School of Fine Art.
