Emji Saint Spero: DISGUST

The Poetic Research Bureau hosts a book release for:

disgust by Emji Saint Spero

Performances by:

Paul Outlaw

Pau S. Pescador

J Shelley Harrison

Video by:

Alsea Diana

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disgust is an epic, fragmented poem born of a week-long performance, a series of escalating constraints that send Emji Saint Spero spiraling into a frenzy and ultimately, a manic break. In this hesitant and hyper-confessional excavation of the quotidian, Saint Spero constructs a manual for maneuvering as a body under duress. Debased, abject, and perfectly problematic, it asks us to dissect the ways in which we are othered and the ways we are complicit in our own objectification. This transcript is an architecture built on lack and inter/dependence. Their language stumbles, stutters, interrupts itself, gets it wrong, doesn’t know what’s being asked of it, is left unfinished, exhausted, and is at its most clairvoyant in its collapse.

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Emji Saint Spero is a writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective engagement. Their practice: a series of approaches, through documentation, personal ephemera, and somatic ritual. They are 1/2 of curbAlert with J Shelley Harrison; together, through movement and collaborative performance, they seek to find embodied modes of connection with unacknowledged spaces of the urban landscape. Saint Spero is the author of almost any shit will do, and they co-founded the Oakland-based small press and queer poetry cult Timeless, Infinte Light with Joel Gregory. With Lauren Levin, they were codevelopmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma), which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.

Paul Outlaw (he/him/his) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary performing artist. Paul’s unsettlingly funny solo projects and collaborations have been presented across North America and in Europe, where he lived full-time for ten years and currently maintains a part-time residence in Berlin. The central themes of his artistic practice are the constructs of race and sexual identity, and how violence has haunted them throughout Euro-American history.

Pau S. Pescador is a contemporary trans-fem nonbinary artist who works in film, photography, and performance that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with an MFA from University of California, Irvine and a BA from University of Southern California. Select performances include: Machine Projects, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Archives; Performa 2015; Colony, New York; UC Berkeley: Durham Studio Theater; PAM, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, with KCHUNG TV, Los Angeles; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Los Angeles; and ForYourArt, Los Angeles. Her first collection of writing, CRUSHES: A NOVELLA, was published by Econo Textual Objects in Spring 2017.

J Shelley Harrison’s work tiptoes between installation, conceptual art, performance, and curation-as-production. They lean into the world of psychogeography, documenting cyclical patterns in our ever-changing urban environment, pushing the boundaries of what art is, and can be. Community involvement plays heavily into Harrison’s background. Their curatorial practice emphasizes inclusion and social engagement. Since 2016, Harrison has curated shows at B4BEL4B, an artist-run space for interdisciplinary art. They founded one of the first qtbipoc performance based parties at The Starline Social Club in Oakland. As a member of the House of Infiniti, they have helped organize events with New World Dysorder, a collective of trans djs that has since gained an international following.

Alsea Diana is a filmmaker and multimedia artist from rural Oregon. She has worked extensively in the field of LGBT representation and collaborated on films that have screened at TIFF, Tribeca, and Cannes.

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Readings are supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts 2021 Organizational Support Grant.