The Writer’s Block @ the DIA

Join HFS, family members and friends of incarcerated artists
SATURDAY, February 28th 1-3pm
In the DIEGO RIVERA COURT 2nd level of the DIA
Free and open to the public

The Writer’s Block is a poetry workshop at Macomb Correctional Facility (more background @HFS).  HFS facilitators and incarcerated artists have been collaborating over the last few years to compile various works of art to present to the public. With the support of the DIA this collaboration will come to fruition with an afternoon of poetry read by friends and family of Writer’s Block Poets. On display will be audio recordings, Writer’s Block publications and various works of art created by Writer’s Block artists and other incarcerated people over the last two years.

The DIA Event was a SMASH

Thanks to all who attended and helped make the event a memorable one. We have had so much positive feedback that we intend to do it again next year. Special thanks to family and friends of Writer’s Block artists for the courageous and inspiring readings. Please stay tuned for the release of a collection of Writer’s Block poems and other artwork in book form.

Warmly in solidarity,
HFS and Writer’s Block

This will be a joint event between the HFS and 9338 Campau. After the presentation we will discuss if there is interest in a reading/discussion/project group around Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

“Desert As Dividing Space: Walt Disney to Bill Gates”
An artist project by Rose DeSloover

WHEN: 7pm, Sunday Feb 1 2015  WHERE: 9338 Joseph Campau

In reality, there is not one moment that does not bring with it its own revolutionary possibility—- it only wants to be defined as a specific one, namely as the chance for a totally new revolution in view of a totally new task. W. Benjamin

Background

My introduction to Walter Benjamin came in 2001 through an NEH summer seminar at University of California, Irvine with Alexander Gelley, Professor of Comparative Literature. It was the title of the seminar that caught my attention, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Commodity Fetishism, and the Aesthetics of the City, At the time I knew nothing about Walter Benjamin the philosopher. The six-week seminar with twenty scholars from all over country and from multiple disciplines started me in a direction that brings me to this spot today.

The seminar required each participant to deliver a “work-in-progress” relating to the work of Benjamin. I chose to present initial research into the L. Dream House, Museum, Spa and initial research into the gated communities of the Coachella Valley in southern California.

In 2010, as a part of a subsequent academic seminar Walls, Borders and Boundaries at Marygrove College, I expanded the Coachella Valley presentation into Desert As Dividing Space: Walt Disney to Bill Gates.

It is this presentation that I want to share as an introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. In The Marvels of Walter Benjamin, the author J. M. Coetzee ends with this statement, The Arcades book, whatever our verdict on it — ruin, failure, impossible project—suggests a new way of writing about civilization, using its rubbish as material rather than its artwork: history from below rather than from above.

We are in the position of looking at the 20th century as Walter Benjamin looked at the 19th century. He used the “debris of mass culture” to read history. I am suggesting that one of the architectural patterns of the 20th century to be examined, under the influence of Walter Benjamin, are the gated communities of the California desert from their beginnings in the 1930’s to 1998.

Rose E. DeSloover

This course runs a slightly more than tangent line to some of the issues of mental health and pharmacology. We will examine the birth of the clinic and the pharmacy from historical and philosophical perspectives, and nervously scratch at the skin of the sociologic of mental health and mental health treatment. We live in a world where a growing number of people take prescription drugs, prescribed or not, and a substantial portion of the population self-medicates in some capacity. We will attempt to locate some of the boundaries of pharmacological supplementation and we will explore the industrial and institutional pharmacological apparatuses. The hope is to challenge the approach common to contemporary medical practices around mental health that seek to “normalize” neurophysiology under the banner of “chemical balances” despite the fact that patients almost never have a medical neurochemical profiling.

Canguilhem – The Normal and the Pathological
First Discussion: Feb 7th @ 12pm (140 Atkinson St, Detroit)
(Section 2, Chapter 1 “From the Social to the Vital”, pgs 237-256 )
Second Discussion: Feb 14th @ 12pm (140 Atkinson St, Detroit)
(Section 2, Chapter 2 “On Organic Norms in Man”, pgs 257-274)

Foucault – The Essential Works Vol 1: Ethics and Subjectivity &  The Birth of the Clinic
Third Discussion: March 7th @ 12pm (11627 Klinger St. Hamtramck)
(“Hermeneutics of the Subject” & “Self Writing”)
Forth Discussion: March 14th @ 12pm (140 Atkinson St. Detroit)
(“Crisis in Fevers”)

Derrida – Dissemination
Fifth Discussion: March 21th @ 12pm (140 Atkinson St. Detroit)
(“Plato’s Pharmacy”, pgs 61-171)
Sixth Discussion: March 28th @ 12pm (140 Atkinson St. Detroit)
(“Plato’s Pharmacy”, pgs 61-171)

Winnicott – Playing and Reality
Seventh Discussion: April 4th @ 12pm (Stella Coffee, Fisher Building Detroit)

Lakoff – Pharmaceutical Reason
Eighth Discussion: April 11th @ 12pm (Stella Coffee Fisher Building Detroit)

Cosgrove – Financial Ties Between DSM Panel Members & Pharmaceutical Industry
Ninth Discussion: April 25th @ 12pm (Stella Coffee Fisher Building Detroit)

Stiegler – Taking Care of Youth
Tenth Discussion: May 16th @ 12pm (Stella Coffee Fisher Building Detroit)

Preciado – Testo Junkie
Final Discussion: March 30th @ 12pm (TBD)