Wenqi Chen

Wenqi (Kiki), who feels slightly dizzy with any kind of self-introduction and self-writing like this, is an anthropologist, actress, and storyteller. She writes non-fiction and plays, yet with a secret love for poetry. Her working/living method is to walk, learn languages, and dramaturge from other’s words. She holds a BA in Chinese literature and art history and an MA in anthropology.

Title of Project:

Poem in Motion: Autoethnography of Riding and Reading the NYC Subway

Project Description:

Someday in early January, I met a man reading a poem in Spanish on the New York City subway. I was so mesmerized by the scene that I forgot I didn’t indeed understand any Spanish. That poem, which grows out of the material condition of the subway and may not be a poem at all, escapes any of my attempts to describe it, interpret it, place it within my knowledge of language and poetry, or give it a name. It escapes the frame of the“phenomenon/phenomenological” to become the “ephemeral”, an enigma, a performance. Yet it was there in the air, messing something up in the relation I thought my body had fixed with the subway as well as the city. How might we do things with it? This autoethnographical project searches after that poem and proposes a performative register for reading the sociality and affectablity of the NYC subway, as a site of relations “under the ground” starting from the “interlinear” of a poem’s affects.

Areas of Academic Interest/Research:

Ethnography, Repair/Reparative reading, Performative writing, Affect theory, Love/Critique, Art labor, Amateurism