Lives reunited About Dani Zelko's urgent editions of the Reunion project (2017-2021)

Abstract

The Reunion project, by Argentine artist and editor Dani Zelko, is the result of the creation of a collaborative writing procedure: someone speaks and Zelko transcribes -by hand, without any recording system- what he is able to hear, using the pauses inherent to orality to change the line. Once printed, the texts are read in a circle of nine chairs with the participation of relatives, friends and neighbors.

The Urgent Editions collect poems-testimonies of people going through traumatic situations (state violence, marginalization, migration, natural catastrophes). This paper proposes a reading of the corpus of books that so far comprise the series. It is based on some questions about the ways in which life and writing are knotted and transfigured in the texts: what happens to the authorial figure in the poems?; How do voice and writing, body and thought intertwine in them?; What notion of urgency emerges from these books? What role does the theatrical dimension play in the project? Taking as a reference Suely Rolnik's contributions on what she characterizes as "violence of the capitalist colonial regime" (Spheres of Insurrection), the hypothesis of this paper argues that Zelko's project promotes the affirmation of the scene of shared life writing as a field of intense micropolitical work; on the one hand, because it allows writers to appropriate their vital forces of creation and collaboration and, on the other, because the procedure dissolves the classical oppositions between writing and orality, poetics and politics, testimony and invention.