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 Design 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 align 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.