Where do the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture meet? This event offers a circus of experimental archi-poems and mini-theatre events in response to the Arc and Flood of SunShip questions. Collaboration, chance, collage and other seriously fun surprises will launch a lively exchange among sense-seeking participants and trouble-making sympaticos.

archi-poetry makes room for poetry and architecture to meet

archi-poetry throws them together, an embrace - in question

archi-poetry precedes us - we awake in its wake

— “_ifesto” (2018)

In response to difficult questions, this event offers collaborative experiments aimed at renewing the architecture, theatre and poetry of the world.

“What is poetry? The very soul of adventure… which creates a situation.”

— Louis Sullivan

The root of poetry (poiesis in Greek) simply means “making” — human making of almost anything: shoes, boats, buildings, characters in a play. Poiesis also names the art of poetry: spoken, written or sung. Understanding poetry as human making, makes the poetry of architecture easier to comprehend, but risks obscuring poetry’s meaningful, musical, and magical complexity.

“It’s not just building… it’s building worlds.”

— John Hejduk

Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be moving and transformative. But just as poetry is indirect, and irreducible to reason, so the gist of architecture is open, and often not what it seems. Human architecture resists explanation, even as it invites and demands participation. One way to reopen human practices of worldmaking — architecture, theatre, poetry, teaching — is by risking more inclusive collaborations.

“Poetry is in everything / the city / this table / the streets,

in each minimal, common, and ridiculous motion”

— Fernando Pessoa

Grant Guy’s Invisible Theatre Events will bring humor, the play of senses, and the everyday, to this architecture and poetry conversation – helping us go beyond and between words. Language and metaphor may be the roots of imagination, but much that matters in the human world cannot easily be said! Archi-Poetry, like theatre, music, art, and dance, interprets and responds to the unspeakable arc and flood of things, reminding us the human condition is a tragicomic construct, and the invisible curtains we draw and raise are within, and between us!

“Poetry is everything that is exposed, in a veiled and searching manner”

— Boccaccio

Collaboration gives rise to Archi-Poetry. Two fresh poems to be shared at the event are thanks to an adventurous crew of student (re)searchers at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba: Andria Langi, Max Sandred, Sabba Rezai and Alixa Lacerna.

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Ted Landrum is a teacher, critic, artist and poet. He is author of Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems (2017), and contributor to two collaborative chapbooks, Room to Room: Poetry & Architecture in Conversation (2018) and Table for Four / Eccentric Crops (2020), and a variety of journals, zines and anthologies. Ted teaches architecture at University of Manitoba, co-curates Winnipeg's annual Architecture + Design Film Festival, and leads ArchiShorts, a 2-minute film contest. He holds a B.Arch (professional) and M.Arch-2 (post-professional) from Ball State University, where he began experimenting with “archipoetry,” “group costumes”, “secret concerts” and collaborative in situ “happenings” as ways of doing and (re)thinking architecture. More at Ubu Loca, an open archive of archi-poetic research.

Grant Guy is an award-winning theatremaker and writer based in Winnipeg. He graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, and has designed for theatre companies across Canada. He was the founder of SHARED STAGE, a cabaret theatre company and home of the DADA DUMBs. For 16 years he was the artistic director of ADHERE+DENY, an object/puppet-based theatre company. Currently, he is steering the CIRCUS OF OBJECTS as a venue for guest artists and the revival of DADA DUMB performances. He is creator of INVISIBLE THEATRE EVENTS, staged without a stage (or fanfare), as an “art walking” observer-provocateur where the everyday becomes the performer.

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Archi-Poetry & Invisible Theatre is part of the Theatres of ArchImagination contribution to SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible, as part of the Arts Letters & Numbers exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.

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