A Grammar Built with Rocks Book Launch

This day-long program celebrates the publication of A Grammar Built with Rocks, an anthology published by Wendy’s Subway and co-edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian. Bringing together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions, the publication foregrounds creative practices that respond to dispossession. It highlights how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.

Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theory of relational belonging, the program emphasizes interconnectivity among liberation struggles while remaining attentive to the specificity of place and history. Across disciplines and forms, the publication and program reflect a shared commitment to relational, cross-disciplinary exchange and collective modes of inquiry.

The day begins with a reading group facilitated by Amber Jamilla Musser that focuses on key concepts across the writings of Glissant and Suzanne Césaire—two prolific thinkers whose work serves as an undercurrent for many artistic practices featured in A Grammar Built with Rocks. A panel discussion moderated by Fawz Kabra considers place-based methodologies developed by artists engaging landscapes shaped by ongoing colonial and ecological harm, and the ways refusals are articulated and aligned across multiple geographies. The program concludes with a reading by Ryan C. Clarke, followed by a performance by Muyassar Kurdi. Throughout the day, a selection of musical offerings by A Grammar Built with Rocks contributors can be experienced in the listening room.

The program is presented as part of that that, which transforms CARA into an expanded bookstore environment. In the weeks preceding our spring exhibition of the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s (1928–2011) personal art collection, we present a series of book launches, readings, and conversations shaped by the poetic force that animates Glissant’s chapter “That That” in his book Poetics of Relation.

Saturday’s program also takes place as part of a weekend-long series of related Wendy's Subway events, including The Trace of Land, a screening of short films at Anthology Film Archives on Friday, January 23, and an After Hours Film School workshop and listening session at Wendy’s Subway on Sunday, January 25.

More information about the book here.

1pm | Writings of Dissent and Relation
Facilitated by Amber Jamilla Musser

This reading group, Writings of Dissent and Relation, facilitated by Amber Jamilla Musser, brings into dialogue two foundational texts in anticolonial thought: Édouard Glissant’s Treatise on the Whole-World (1997) and Suzanne Césaire’s “The Great Camouflage” (1945). Through close reading and group discussion, participants will consider how these writers articulate decolonization and the political stakes of poetry within broader struggles for liberation.

The session will also clarify important concepts such as Glissant’s definitions of opacity and relation, exploring how these ideas emerge from the lived conditions of Martinique and can be mobilized within contemporary artistic practice and critical research.

RSVP to the reading group

2:30pm | Panel Discussion
Moderated by Fawz Kabra

A panel discussion moderated by Fawz Kabra considers place-based methodologies developed by artists engaging landscapes shaped by ongoing colonial and ecological harm, and the ways refusals are articulated and aligned across multiple geographies.

4:30pm | Reading by Ryan C. Clarke

5pm | Performance by Muyassar Kurdi
A ritualistic sound performance guided by the voice, unfolding through breath, resonance, and deep listening, carried by the body.

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Shoghig Halajian is a curator and writer who serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA, and previously was Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has presented curatorial and artistic projects at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Redcat, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zurich; Le Magasin-Centre National d'art Contemporain, Grenoble; among other venues. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from University of California San Diego in 2024.

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ryan C. Clarke is a tonal geologist from the southeastern banks of the Mississippi, and an editor and curator at Dweller Electronics. His work has been published and presented by Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, e-flux journal, Rhizome, Burnaway, Terraforma, Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, and MoMA PS1. With Dweller, Clarke produces festivals and publications that center the perspectives of Black electronic musicians.

Fawz Kabra is a curator and writer. She is co-founder of Brief Histories, a curatorial project and publishing platform currently based in New York. She has curated exhibitions at the Brooklyn Public Library; Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery, New York; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY; e-flux Screening Room, New York; BRIC Arts and Media House, Brooklyn; and the Palestinian Museum, Ramallah; and was Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Kabra has organized symposia at Global Art Forum 13, Dubai and The Armory Show, New York. Her writing and interviews appear in various exhibition catalogues as well as Art Papers, Canvas, e-flux Film, Ibraaz, and Ocula. Kabra’s editorial projects include Through the Ruins: Talks on Human Rights & the Arts (2023), publishedbythe Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College. She is visiting faculty at CCS Bard, and Curator of the Art and Design Gallery at Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.

Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American, New York City–based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors both the futuristic and the ancient through meditative movement and sonic exploration. Centered on embodiment and a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.

Amber Jamilla Musser is a professor of English, Africana Studies, and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies (BRES) at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail, she has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024).

Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that supports emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature. WS’s interdisciplinary program includes free readings, talks, performances, and reading groups, as well as sliding-scale writing workshops and intensives. A multi-series publishing initiative includes artists’ books, poetic texts, and hybrid-genre works by time-based artists. The non-circulating library holds a collection of over 4,000 titles, ranging from poetry and fiction, to criticism and art books.