ABOUT
THE FIRST OF ITS KIND, POETIC
SOCIETIES IS A 501(C)(3) NON-
PROFIT ORGANIZATION FOR
PRACTICING BODY-CONSCIOUS
EXPRESSION AND GOVERNANCE.
Established in 2017 as an institutional
critique project by ava ansari, POETIC
SOCIETIES is a 501(c)(3) Curatorial, Legal,
and Desig Lab in Waawiiyatanong/Detroit
that facilitates intercultural dialogues and
produces Transmedia Poetry and Healing
Technologies for the Somatic, Sonic, and
Scenic liberation of self, land, and senses of
belonging across the earth.
POETIC SOCIETIES was born out of years of
institutional violence experienced
intergenerationally through forced physical,
environmental, and sexual movement,
cultural reappropriation, and gaslighting by
and for Queer, Nonbinary, Transgender,
Nonconforming gender, Black, Indigenous,
and Non-English poets, artists, musicians,
healers, and organizers.
We create projects and programs to
circulate our ancestral healing modalities
through linguistic and ritualistic modes of
poetic process. Our collaborative workshops
and public programs encapsulate temporal
and spatial zones that remove pain from the
sensual, institutional, and digital bodies and
cultivate celebratory memories of healing
self, land, and senses of belonging on local
and global scales.
By cocreating multilocation and
multilingual tactical and vital media in
interventional urban-digital celebratory
spaces, we alig distanced bodies with the
medicine of poetry and rituals of release
beyond the arbitrary national borders. We
work in experimental and slow modes,
actively resisting the patriotic, capitalist,
and ableist suppressions on human bodies.
As displaced, mislabeled, and disabled
bodies, equipped with the art of
interdependency, POETIC SOCIETIES is the
house of queer and immigrant technologies
and transforming practices beyond the
body-suppressing manners of organizational
work.
We are located at the historical building of
Underground Resistance (UR)+Submerge, an
anticorporate Museum, Record label, and
Artist Residency that guards Detroit Techno
and global sonic revolution in North End, the
legacy land of Motown, Funk, Soul, Jazz,
HipHop, and Techno movements with poets,
polymaths, urban technologists, architects,
farmers, and healing justice organizers who
protect the land and its cultural heritage
from the development plans that are out of
touch with the community or attempt fake
alignments.
Our nonprofit organization is modeled after
and for the organic network of bodies—
from humans to animals to plants to fungi
to planets—to liberate from the colonizing
and alienating control of free body
navigation and collective mind across the
earth.