Death Fugue: A Collaborative Making of Digital Poetry
Channel: xtine burrough
Date: 15/05/2016

On May 5, 2016, The Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies hosted readings of poems of the Holocaust from 10-2pm in the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology building at UT Dallas. During this event, visitors were encouraged to collaborate beneath the lobby stairway in interacting with and creating images of their bodies with the projected text of Paul Celan’s poem, Death Fugue. Artist xtine burrough supplied the projected text, a work of kinetic typography, facilitated the collaborations, and recorded participants as they made the text their own. The result is a communal enactment of the poem as a text that requires many bodies for its construction. Some actors used their bodies, others held the text on the petals of red roses, and some projected the text onto the bodies of others (their children, their friends, or their colleagues). Interacting with the poem in fragments elicits the temporal space of memory. In the spirit of collaboration and memory making, the artist edited the textual bodies together into a cohesive poem.

Death Fugue
Written by Paul Celan

English Translation
Dr. Frederick Turner and Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

Oration
Dr. Frederick Turner

Original Music and Sound Recording by
Nathan Grande

Kinetic Type, Video Recording, Participant Facilitation, Editing
xtine burrough