Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
The Poetic Research Bureau and Wendy’s Subway present a book launch for *A Grammar Built with Rocks*, edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian. The evening will include readings, a film screening, and a discussion with filmmaker Rene Gabri and writer and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationships between bodies and land, *A Grammar Built with Rocks* explores artists’ engagements with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis. The publication highlights how creative research methodologies can function as radically new place-making practices. Bringing together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions, the book examines how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place. / **Screening** Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, *Black Bach Artsakh* (2021, 150 minutes) *Black Bach Artsakh* is a filmic construction based on interviews with inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh conducted in 2007, during a period between two wars. As in their earlier films, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri work with multiple layers of time. Whereas earlier projects involved live editing and presentation, here they use temporal distance to re-evaluate archival footage. Harking back to the engagements of Straub/Huillet and Pier Paolo Pasolini with the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, the filmmakers experiment with the possible effects of his music. Full bios of participants at: https://www.poeticresearch.com/events/a-grammar-built-with-rocks