HOW CAN WE ASSEMBLE OURSELVES? | Public Commission, Karl Miller Center, Portland State University

How Can We Assemble Ourselves? is a poetic manifesto of inquiry and suggestion, the lines of which appear dispersed throughout the Karl Miller Center at Portland State University. Responding to an architecture that encourages gathering and collaboration, our text is about the possibilities and efficacy of being and building with others. The lines of the poem accrue, responding to each other and to their specific locations in the building. Each one is a fragment that can be read in isolation but also needs the others to be complete. The piece’s open-ended design encourages a multitude of different readings. For visitors, the piece may be read in part or as a whole, in linear order or according to their own sequences, unfolding and accumulating as they move through the building. 

How can we assemble ourselves to sing a song that erases the embarrassment of dancing? To install hinges that open in any direction? To fit our abilities into the gaps of others’ needs? How can we assemble ourselves to rewrite the structures of value? To identify the latent violence in our togetherness? To make everyday a reparation?  How can we assemble ourselves to see our shadows as part of our shape? To share a solidity in the ocean of the abstract? And, to write a new horizon?