evi nakou: endless distances inside me, highways of quiet

“endless distances inside me, highways of quiet”* explores how transmedia ethnographic poetry can reflect the complexity in the ways we listen, see, experience, and apprehend togetherness. Devising an asynchronous, playful and intuitive “gossip”, the process is echoing lived experiences and imagined narratives. Reverberations of existing poetry coincide with improvised sound, music, performance, and imagery in an embodied chitchat in and of its present.

This gossip wishes for itself to be a place of tending and attending to the complexities, joy, and uncertainties of the everyday. Transmedia poetry, both as a vessel and a practice of itself, follows curiosity, imagination, and humor as crevices through which voices are heard, stories are listened, and bodies are felt.

“endless distances inside me, highways of quiet” is practice-based research, or else an assemblage of reflections, fragmented materials, methodologies that interrelate to one another often in non-linear, intuitive, and unpredictable ways.

The gossip comes around in silence and in hustle, at late night calls, and endless chatting, at the backseat of a car, and airport terminals, at doorsteps and shaded benches, with real and imagined friends who go by the names; Chara, Franny, Natasha, Marisha, Saeed, Marina, Kae, Anastasia, and Virginia.

*“endless distances inside me, highways of quiet” is a line borrowed from the poem “Unlove” by Franny Choi (published in the collection “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On”, Harper Collins Publishers, 2022).