Communicator Series no. 8
Performed at
Poetic Research Bureau
Los Angeles, California
10 December 2024
Curated by
Emji Saint Spero
Sound by
jeremy kennedy
Dissonant presence. Strategic noncoherence. Communicator Series no. 8 offers witness-resistant poetic happenings for raw liberatory combustion. Join us Tuesday December 10th, 7pm at Poetic Research Bureau for performances Punitive Worm, Cedric Tai, and San Francisco-based artist Mason J. You’re welcome.
Free / RSVP
About the Artists
Mason J (he/they) is a Blaxican-Indigenous and Sephardic Jewish artist, historian, and community organizer based on Ohlone Land (San Francisco). As a queer writer, visual artist, and disability justice advocate, Mason amplifies marginalized voices. They serve as interim Executive Director of Radar Productions, contributing to projects like SFPL's Show Us Your Spines residency and teaching for the Queer Ancestors Project. Mason's work with Still Here SF reflects their commitment to challenging societal norms through innovative projects.
Punitive Worm is the collaborative project of multidisciplinary artists and partners Nikki Ochoa and Mas Guerrero, known for their fluid approach to performance and music. A performance entity rooted in live improvisational sound, their work spans a wide range of forms, from the duo to a cast of 30, from poetic theatre to improvisational "no wave" music. Punitive Worm is constantly evolving and exploring raw energetic expressionism in every incarnation of the work. Rejecting conventional narratives and oppressive structures, genre defying Punitive Worm is interested in operating alongside resistance, chaos, and the experimental.
Their performances are often unpredictable, raw, and political, emphasizing spontaneity while challenging dominant cultural paradigms and false authority, making poetry that exists in physical space is the aim.
Currently Punitive Worm explores loving irreverence through abstracted poetic narratives. We are inspired by poets of color and their ability to face disappearing with anarchist and alternative narratives brought forth by sound, sculpture, and writing. How can the colonization of art and people be combated? With, “Poems that shoot guns,” as Amiri Baraka writes, “Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step.”
Nikki Ochoa | ig @vomitchild
Mas Guerrero | ig @midi_wizard
Cedric Tai is an un-disciplinary artist born in Detroit, currently residing in Los Angeles (Tongva/Chumash/Kizh land). They think through sculpture, talking, writing, performance, and experimental exhibitions.
Her conceptual work focuses on neurodivergent experience, labor, and politics.
Tai has partnered with neuroscientists, academics from critical psychiatry, artist collectives, disability justice social media influencers, and somatic therapists to co-create accessible resources particularly around “mental health” and queer anti-capitalist liberation.
Some of their work is set up systematically (coding/spreadsheets/workshops/repetition) so that they can focus on the spontaneous and experimental way she engages with the audience. Examples include “Brixels” tessellations, her reverse-pick-pocketing workshops, and the list of artists for They Didn’t Go.
Other works are like love letters, or are intentionally not efficient, wherein Tai comes to know someone or something through immersing herself in an intimate process. In Indirectly Yours, another artist installed a year’s worth of her sculptures with carte blanche to display, alter, or destroy them as their solo show. Currently, her Neuroqueer Film Workshops let participants each edit their own version so it exists in multitudes.
A friend remarked they’re “Pathologically Curious,” a lovely way to describe how their Autism/ADHD re-frames shame into wonder, absurdity, meaningful challenges, and joyful interdependence.