ABOUT THIS SITE
Curb(ed)
RESTRAIN // HOLD IN // HOLD BACK // REPRESS // KEEP A LID ON // BRIDLE // FIGHT BACK // BITE BACK // HOLD // DRAW A LINE // EDGE A WORLD
How does it feel to walk your own neighborhood as a perpetual stranger?
How does it feel to be disoriented in your own home?
Why are our ways of knowing tethered to (keeping/losing) our bearings?
What are the paths we take to return our bodies to ourselves?
Who are we when we are (at) home?
This ongoing project is one way in which we answer these questions. With each of these ongoing acts of answering and making, we mark the 20th Anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and the white supremacist and nationalist response to this trauma which has led to a well-documented two-decade rise in anti-South Asian and anti-immigrant violence in the United States.
Curb(ed) is an interactive webspace that functions as a sensory, multi-disciplinary companion to Curb, a book of poetry by Divya Victor (Nightboat, 2021). It hosts a clustering of approaches to invite discussion about racial and national differences as they intersect, combust, and resolve in public spaces in the United States. The webspace is a fundamentally collaborative effort intended to enable cross-disciplinary approaches to storytelling and interpretive witnessings. It hosts materials created in response to poetry from Curb: rhetorical musical assemblages created by Dr. Carolyn Chen, Los Angeles–based new musique composer; experimental, minimalist documentary using Google satellite imaging, created by Los Angeles–based artist and writer Amarnath Ravva; illustrations by Austrian illustrator and designer Karin Aue, who is based in Singapore. Sean Deyoe joins the project as designer and conceptual presenter of this webspace. In late 2021, this space will host new ways of narrativizing acts of exclusion and inclusion in public spaces to ask how the United States can be mapped experientially and phenomenologically, through storytelling and sensory engagements, in collaboration with Andrew Peterson and Cristóbal Martinez.
The project has involved collaborations with Michigan State University’s Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab, the Michigan State University Libraries at MSU, and the Press at Colorado College. This webspace and its allied iterative projects are made possible by funding from Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters and the Andrew Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.