EXIT 43 GOES TO MUNICH
I’m immensely grateful to artists Vera Lutz and Simon Lässig and to curator Gloria Hasnay for inviting me into dialogue with their fascinating exhibition Romeo’s Eyes at the art center Kunstverein München, where a selection of collages from The Republic of Exit 43 and a leporello from SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED titled A Cage Full of Oxygen are on display in the archive space from June 20 through July 6, 2025. Please see this link for further details.
The Republic of Exit 43—published by Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz’s experimental publishing project Atelos Press in 2016—is a book-length work of ecopoetics that lays out, in visual, lineated, and prose poetry, documentary photographs, and exhumed archival documents, the tortuous tale of two landfills: one at the heart of New York Harbor and notoriously visible from space (Fresh Kills Landfill) and one entirely unknown but far more pernicious, stationed across from the author’s childhood home in a New York suburb (the Syosset Landfill). The books and the “pop-up” collages displayed here result from a decade of research into these landscapes of waste: Fresh Kills, a sensational monument to a culture of disposability and planned obsolescence, on the one hand, and on the other, the more dangerous, mute toxic waste sites located across her street (a copper rod mill and adjoining dump), situated within a cancer cluster of postwar towns lining a freeway, and planned during the so-called Great Acceleration without regard for public health.
Interrupted by verbovisual collages imagined as pop-up windows onto panoramas of inconclusive data, the libretto of Exit 43drills into ecological damage that it presents as “incompletely virtual.” These pop-up poems compose beguilingly euphonious choruses of last-ditch Victorian pastorals, Environmental Protection Agency reports, and corporate subterfuge that surround polluted terrain. The work aims to involve readers in the labyrinthine effort of piecing together what it calls a “malice in Underland,” and manifests a need to implode the bounds of the book as form. It weaves together scripts for antique voices at odds, essays on tragedy and pastoral, data assemblages and shredded fieldwork photos, artifacts of an augmented-reality poem installed at the dump, and documentation of a room-sized confessional “stanza” constituted by a year of the author’s own garbage, relying on the nonsense logics of Lewis Carroll as hinges.
Image: Jennifer Scappettone.
The exhibition Romeo’s eyes is funded by the Biehler von Dorrer Stiftung, the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung, the Stiftung Stark für Gegenwartskunst, the Stiftung Straßenkunst der Stadtsparkasse München and the Kemmler Foundation [Kemmler Kemmler GmbH].
