(Peru)

“Life has already surpassed the writer”

We were visited by the Peruvian poet and filmmaker, Tilsa Otta, who shared a bit of her urban poetry outside traditions, and in this case, outside the city , giving workshops in different areas within San Pancho:

In  the Secondary Technical School no. 18 “Mar Patrimonial” and “Imiari”, a free learning center, a workshop for children and adolescents was held.  It focused on the discovery of the dimension of the game and experimentation of language through various exercises such as, acrostics, palindromes, surrealist games involving questions and answers, and the composition of a group rap with rhyme and assonance; which resulted in very creative verses.

Tilsa shared material through projections with various examples of fine arts within language and the written word, exploring the cross between literature and art.  Young people entered on a visual journey from surrealism to the Bauhaus movement to creating viral poems built with emoticons that navigate through our digital realm.

The Pyrotechnic Poetry Workshop was held in two sessions for adult participants. In the first part of the workshop, the attendees had a brief free writing exercise mimicking elements of the Beat movement with examples of American, Peruvian and Latin American poets through a playful group exercise and projection of the different styles of written poetry. Then, through a walk through of the town, participants had to recognize potential elements that could be used in the development of a poem.  The fundamental intention was to concentrate on conscious observation. “Look with new eyes” was the invitation Tilsa gave to constantly “re-know” the familiar. From that inspiration, participants were encouraged to write poems that would narrate the daily moments that are built in every corner of the town. The poems were placed in various parts of San Pancho to those curious passerby.

Tilsa explored, analyzed and discussed exercises that border visual and sound arts with poetic practice.

Tilsa walked again and again through the streets of San Pancho, with all her senses open, discovering the subtleties so characteristic of daily life here. She noticed, in the dry season that coincided with her stay, the large amount of dirt and dust that accumulates everywhere, in the cars too, and discovered how it is a custom practiced by locals to spontaneously draw and write small sentences on the windshields when passing by. The poet decided to participate in her own exercise and dedicated herself to writing fragments of her poems in dusty cars. Poems written in dust were to encourage reading and the appropriation of common spaces to share poetry. The artist made a record of her ephemeral interventions thus reflecting on the tension between both gestures: her poems that would be erased with haste and the ability to remain  them through photographic record.

“I wrote a poem of 36 verses distributed in the dusty windows of 36 cars in San Pancho, in this way the text became ephemeral delivered to the designs of chance, in its reading, in its existence and in its order.  The movement of the cars and their distribution changed the narrative of the poem.”

Tilsa partnered with the Entreamigos Community Center for “Book and Earth Day”, in which she created an incredible reproduction of the “5 meters of poems” book by Peruvian author, Carlos Oquendo de Amat from the 1920s.  Tilsa gave a public reading and shared the work by exhibiting the poems at Entreamigos as well as an interesting biography about the poet.

In her spare time, Tilsa began recording a postponed record of popular wisdom and left her mark on one of the walls of Casa LILHA, where she wrote a message: 

“What an incomparable luxury it is to bathe in the rain

Dry yourself with the sun

May the earth completely cover your body

With the help of the wind. “