Reimagining the Republic of a New York Cancer Cluster: History of a Closet Opera and its Outtakes

Kunstverein München
Munich, Germany
Friday, June 20
7pm

Poet, translator, and literary scholar Jennifer Scappettone will speak about the making of her multimodal documentary poem The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, a work of visual, lineated, prose, and performance poetry published by Lyn Hejinian’s cross-disciplinary project Atelos Press in 2016, just prior to the election of Donald Trump—and the toxic histories of two landfills that prompted it. This lecture details the process behind the making of textual collages on view in the Kunstverein’s Archive Space.

The lecture is part of a program of events that further expands the exhibition Romeo’s eyes and was also conceived by the artists Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz, who regard the program as equal to the works developed for the exhibition on site. In tune with Lutz and Lässig’s practices, Scappettone similarly shares an attentiveness to fragmentation and conditioned structures of looking.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts and is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice and Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia, 2014 and 2025), the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (surrounding post-911 U.S., published by Litmus, 2009), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016).

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].