Poor Claudia published poetry, prose and conversations online and in print from 2009 to 2018.

Tony Mancus

through All the World's Futures

  • Korea
  • Germany
  • Canada
  • England
  • France
  • Japan
  • Czech Republic
  • Uruguay
  • Greece
  • Romania
  • Serbia
  • Brazil
  • Norway
  • Venezuela
  • Switzerland
  • Hungary
  • US
  • Holland
  • Main Pavilion

Korea

In a singular world where the outside is only presented as replication

white/austere and digitized

interfaced to everywhere. Data cubes and touchable screens – the sound of metal

being shaped & fans & silence.

One woman rises to run in a closed circle – node extending from her mind – the events become fragmented until an orb appears.

Some new component to press against the senses. Blue serves to shock against the pale everything

within

the orb appears liquid – from which she, the woman, alone and paste-white, places her face into and comes to wonder & see something else that enters the world of the viewer – one line of red and two of black that cross on the carpet.

All the world’s future and we’re in it together…There is here and there.

Germany

The news press and zents – to give a space for voice for people whose places don’t remain or for the placeless in photo and word.

And the grid provides a looping video – one game as life to become the game presented in person – the fold in reality warps when the gun is fired

our imagined world is liquid and what narrative a person carries helps to form our versions

of self among weapons and the capture of motion.

The distancing of self and dancing as it moves across continents through the internet and animation of one reality – places our selves against where we have been.

Canada

The shop is fake and when it’s photographed the fake becomes

still and more than real, or real, at least, at last – the blur between disappearing

and what it is we record – or what lens we use to call whatever real is as real as it, it is

cooptation through clays and paint been emptied

dust motes can’t be captured or captioned & how the light

lets dust pile in and show

topped with a way to part people from money by sending it through a metal Rube Goldberg machine

that ends in plate-glass plinko – “Only Euro Please”

series of cast offs as what’s left.

England

all cock and droopy sex bits

Outside a tree pulled up from its place is moving across the space in front of the pavilion, what animates wanting and how sound carries

turns out it’s French.

Cigarettes placed strategically in the halved torsos of women with a washing machine and circular porn shots like record covers on the wall

concrete claims and sex animals formed of bulbs and bent lines all surrounded by severely dehydrated piss yellow walls

and cigarettes either in the ass or vagina. only one in the navel.

No one tries to stop the trees and this is France – thanks!

France

The trees remote are better nature than what nature can handle – trees

leave tracks to our imagined pacing. We lay on false concrete

and listen to the sounds of the roots and sap and time lapse the tree walking

around the vestibule covered in people

Japan

The keys are built into the sky

And a boat at every center

Red drops from the ceiling like

a night coming on and closing

and the sky it drops this way

to open. heaps of keys inside

the boats – so no ways out

but what is leaving & what does

staying mean?

Boats for all the edges

red strung for all our lives

inaccessible points hung in front

and rung to others.

Think of the snow obscuring this or nothing

Think of that and what it means

to open.

Czech Republic

One narrow white path between

the whole of a thing

Marx in white on white built into the wall that holds a mirror

up against the black and white painting

you pass through but know not what to look at –

the thing or the reflection of the thing & in crafting us as

viewers split in space between reflection & reception

we have become illusion itself or pace and pass through

between art and replica and seeing as what of this:

“the problem is not to free ourselves from illusions. The problem is to free ourselves from situations which demand illusions”

so the real is reflection of the real and what meaning is crushed by the apotheosis of meaning

or between and through us and less a lens but

Uruguay

Strings banding pencils to a white wall – looks playable

and to see the placement markings – movements in time?

minuscule cut paper interior mapping

something out – the built world as circuitry

and hieroglyph and map

as life weight placed and white nearly flat everywhere

global myopia – to scale the world as something stringed

to grow it again/time

Greece

memory as present thing – taxidermy shop erected

in the empty spaces, and left

empty – skins and a wolf the ham, the harm

no, the absence of people – of things – of a state

the arm of animals as described – escape is

impossible and we are encroaching, a man blames

women for the change – delicacy – “the making

of what we wear

will, it’s all

over now. The tanneries

have closed. All other things …are finished”

To say goodbye as a future

Romania

Darwin’s room – semi

figurative large-scale paintings

man and wolf as set

in snow covered birch forest – van gogh a little

bit in the ear

the wolf’s mouth and man’s blood…what threat

is life – in this to create

Serbia

United dead nations gather dirt covered flags with the metal ground wearing a swirl of the washed off colors and the names of former nations that housed the many flags written on the walls. date to date.

Brazil

the dripping of water

from a white bag

onto a pool

and onto

a screen

contained in

a wooden crate

Norway

big broken windows – the frames

Large microphones breathe in

interior space

singular notes being played,

plaintive, plaintiff and almost song rises –

harmonium to discord, but the glass

in pieces stills

no going or back

Venezuela

Poem on color line/blocks

I give you my word/mi parole

babies being breast fed by mothers in balaclavas, children in balacalvas telling their short lives, an old woman in a balaclava reading a manifesto flanked by two younger women waving cooking instruments

Switzerland

bubbling liquid the flesh

tones of Europe

supposed against a green

wash of light

to make

faces coarse/course

Hungary

black dots as wheels on a white wall that can rotate

to reveal ID titles/slogans in slots cut out of the black

balls in tubes get pushed around by fans in the upper

half of the room – movement between what one is

and isn’t and is again – pneumatic motion

a breathing pillow in the center

the curve of light and shadow behind it

A blow up airstream presented by Swatch, full of LED flowers and the sounds of crickets

US might be missing, might be a performance of refusal

US

shadow presentation – to narrate the collection and objects – it might be a sheep on the wall

videos of women weaving their hair together in shadow

Holland

charred wood and writing marks

permanent and suggestive variations

on being able to be / to be to be

all ways

charred wood and writing marks

permanent and suggestive variations

on being able to be / to be to be

all ways

in the center one circle of dried rose buds that look like nuts or cork

and a neat array of scythes

against the grain they’ve cut in photograph – one way home

Main Pavilion

A room with ‘the end’ written out and packed for it, presented

as an edifice of luggage. A stepladder into the dome

with the top platform cut out to say the same two words

sounds of a man replicating TB and video of this life coughed out as one possible

photos of faces erased by print

song about coffee and currency with women around a table – women and men break into a song about products – lollipop – narration of objects being spoken over top of the footage

warehouses and warehouses

“the miners remain armed and away from work, this is illegal” sung

the sound of a register tabulating

situations of workers in the world – the production locations basically empty but for the singers when lit fully and bringing life to the objects they’re singing about?

Palladium stack in Russia – world supply being controlled and manipulated by governments and objects continue being made – all sung

discard the parts from everywhere, we are all complicit.

Tony Mancus

Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, most recently City Country (Seattle Review) and collaboratively with Magus Magnus, a section of eckClogs (Furniture Press). With Meg Ronan he co-curates the In Your Ear reading series in Washington, DC, and with Sommer Browning he co-founded Flying Guillotine Press. He currently lives in Arlington, VA with his wife Shannon (the doctor), and three fuzzbucket cats.