sabbatical
For the 2006-2007 academic year, Gabrielle Civil will be out of the office:
writing, reading, researching; making poems, showing art, and performing experiments; shadowing mad geniuses, reconsidering race, gender and the body; rekindling old flames and blazing new trails; carless, leaseless, furnitureless; cataloguing and analyzing her own critical creative practice; asking questions about Karen Finley and Eleanor Antin; trying to be Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rirkrit Tirivanija all in one; putting up so as not to shut up; being put up by her pals in New York and Chicago and the Gambia and Puerto Rico and sleeping on couches or under the stars; traveling around the world and holing up in the childhood bedroom of the house in Detroit where her parents have lived since 1971; bloodfishing; visitng the poor house; rejuvenating, generating and circulating work—the new stuff: Swallow the Fish: Black Feminist Adventures in Performance Art and hopefully publishing the poems, plays and translations she already produced but set aside while teaching, performing, organizing and gamboling about in the fair twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul; rethinking process; trying meditation and learning to rest; being open; trying to open in new space