About Pinsapo
Pinsapo is a web of tightly or loosely connected people living around the world who configure themselves in different ways at different times to make work together. Right now the web is stretched between the US, Kurdistan, Andalusia, Sweden, Turkey, and Palestine but new threads are being cast out all the time. We have an affinity for work in translation, work about translation and work in languages other than English, but this is by no means a criterion or a limit.
Our basic commitment is to helping with the creation and publicization of homeless poetry and art works. Put in another way, we place ourselves as a collection of people interested in being readers, commentators, audience, participants or co-creators for works that need a home space and a supportive family beyond the more profitable, more structured and probably more efficient cultural institutions that are otherwise nominally available to artists in search of a public. We want to be as messy, contradictory and inconsistent as a city is, with changing configurations of people sprouting up in collaboration and then resting, where each new partnership will be idiosyncratically organized depending on what the participants are inclined to do.
Currently, we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Our name
Pinsapo is a name that was produced by the vagaries of memory, when one of us mistakenly applied it to the Century Plant (aka Sentry Plant, Maguey, Agave Americana). It was the slow and rising consonants of Pinsapo that accidentally came to designate for us the long life and spectacular death-bed florescence of the spiny monocarpic plant* after which our project was intended to be named.
So we identify this collaboration by way of a misnomer. Pinsapo aspires to the kind of linguistic accuracy that accepts how words enter the mind and leave, or slowly and indiscernibly transform into something else, finding intimacy with new referents. The illusion of the definite and unshakeable word lasts only as long as our willingness to speak and act in accordance with it. Here's to the errant word, wandering where it doesn't belong...
* flowering only once and then dying
A "Collective" Riff
...The experimental terrain in which difference collects.
...A humming concatenation of units in which difference can be traded, altered, spent, and smoothed.
...Where personal descriptors such as place of birth, accumulated years on the planet, phenotype, earlobe shape, scent of one's house, taste for hats, furriness, fashion sense, arch height, erotic proclivities, rate of decomposition, preferred form of terrestrial locomotion, constitute the abundant sculptural material we all have at hand to mold and spread.
...A nonstop waxing-waning of power and status among a global species of resplendent nobodies.