Talk: Jennifer Scappettone

Reimagining the Republic of a New York Cancer Cluster: History of a Closet Opera and its Outtakes 

Friday, June 20
7pm

Poet, translator, and literary scholar Jennifer Scappettone will speak about the making of her multimodal documentary poem The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, a work of visual, lineated, prose, and performance poetry published by Lyn Hejinian’s cross-disciplinary project Atelos Press in 2016, just prior to the election of Donald Trump—and the toxic histories of two landfills that prompted it. This lecture details the process behind the making of textual collages on view in the Kunstverein’s Archive Space.

The lecture is part of a program of events that further expands the exhibition Romeo’s eyes and was also conceived by the artists Simon Lässig and Vera Lutz, who regard the program as equal to the works developed for the exhibition on site. In tune with Lutz and Lässig’s practices, Scappettone similarly shares an attentiveness to fragmentation and conditioned structures of looking.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performing arts and is a professor of literature, creative writing, gender studies, and environmental humanities at the University of Chicago. Her books include Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice and Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia, 2014 and 2025) and the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (surrounding post-911 U.S., published by Litmus, 2009), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016).

Presentation: Jennifer Scappettone

The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores

June 21 – July 6, 2025

The Republic of Exit 43—published by Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz’s experimental publishing project Atelos Press in 2016—is a book-length work of ecopoetics that lays out, in visual, lineated, and prose poetry, documentary photographs, and exhumed archival documents, the tortuous tale of two landfills: one at the heart of New York Harbor and notoriously visible from space (Fresh Kills Landfill) and one entirely unknown but far more pernicious, stationed across from the author’s childhood home in a New York suburb (the Syosset Landfill). The books and the “pop-up” collages displayed here result from a decade of research into these landscapes of waste: Fresh Kills, a sensational monument to a culture of disposability and planned obsolescence, on the one hand, and on the other, the more dangerous, mute toxic waste sites located across her street (a copper rod mill and adjoining dump), situated within a cancer cluster of postwar towns lining a freeway, and planned during the so-called Great Acceleration without regard for public health.

Interrupted by verbovisual collages imagined as pop-up windows onto panoramas of inconclusive data, the libretto of Exit 43 drills into ecological damage that it presents as “incompletely virtual.” These pop-up poems compose beguilingly euphonious choruses of last-ditch Victorian pastorals, Environmental Protection Agency reports, and corporate subterfuge that surround polluted terrain. The work aims to involve readers in the labyrinthine effort of piecing together what it calls a “malice in Underland,” and manifests a need to implode the bounds of the book as form. It weaves together scripts for antique voices at odds, essays on tragedy and pastoral, data assemblages and shredded fieldwork photos, artifacts of an augmented-reality poem installed at the dump, and documentation of a room-sized confessional “stanza” constituted by a year of the author’s own garbage, relying on the nonsense logics of Lewis Carroll as hinges.