The Poetry Project is pleased to announce You Have My Word, a three-night engagement on liminal languages curated by 2021–22 Curatorial Fellows moguLUOBO.

You Have My Word features a series of happenings that involve languages that don’t quite properly exist: lovers’ codes, hypertrophied dialects, asemic writing, the bad and the wrong and the asignifying sound, and semantic sense melting down into somatic sensuality.

A collection of artists who will create an improvisatory weave of chaos linguistics: visual symbols, bodily signs, Black dialectical speech, diaphanous Mandarin phonics, breathless and broken syntax, machine-learning, star-listening, tongues made of film strips, and so on. Alternative histories of language will bubble up and burst forth from the world beneath the world. The stage that separates audience from performer will be joyfully razed.

This event series is curated by moguLUOBO, a duo consisting of Chang Yuchen, who restlessly chases an imaginary LUOBO (萝卜 carrot) in front of her and Fan Wu, who idealistically appreciates mogu (蘑菇 mushroom) that grows in all directions. moguLUOBO is also an experiment where Fan’s deteriorating Mandarin and Yuchen’s underdeveloped English meet, delight in, and console each other.

You Have My Word will take place in person at St. Mark’s Church the evenings of Wednesday, September 7, through Friday, September 9.