Amir Parsa, an internationally acclaimed writer, poet and translator, Parsa is the author of seventeen literary books, including Kobolierrot, Feu L’encre/Fable, Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition, Erre, and L’opéra minora, a 440-page multilingual work that is in the MoMA Library Artists’ Books collection and in the Rare Books Collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
An uncategorizable body of work, his plurilingual oeuvre—written in English, French, Farsi and Spanish and various hybrids—constitutes a radical polyphonic enterprise that puts into question national, cultural and aesthetic attachments while fashioning new genres, forms and even species of literary artifacts. These provocative works employ various registers of textuality, fuse discourses to fashion new ones, and explore possibilities unique to each language and to literature as a whole. His writings in both English and French have been anthologized, and he has contributed to a number of print and online publications, including Fiction International, Textpiece, Guernica, Armenian Poetry Project and a mash-up issue of Madhatters’ Review and Bunk Magazine.
His translations include Bruno Durocher-Kaminski’s And They Were Writing Their History, and the first two books of Nadia Tueni, which appeared under the title The Blond Texts & The Age of Embers. Two books are being reissued in 2015 by UpSet Press—Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition and Tractatüus Philosophiká-Poeticüus, a theory of artistic creation that also reads like a labyrinthine story. Simultaneously in 2015, he launched, with Le Chaise (Yes, Le), the ‘Clandies’ (more formally classified as FoCD—Folios for the Clandestine Diffusions), full-blown works that nevertheless are most poignantly characterized by one particular property, their clandestine diffusions. Slated for limited dissemination in 2016 is another ‘Clandie’, One day Soon I Will Be the New Emperor of the New Persian Empire Just You Wait and See (And We Will All Live Happily Ever After I Promise).
His curatorial interjections, conceptual pieces, artistic interventions, and critical educational praxis have taken place in a host of public spaces, organizations, universities and environments. A former Lecturer and Educator at The Museum of Modern Art, Amir was born in Tehran, educated at French international schools and at Princeton and Columbia universities, and is currently based in New York. A former Chairperson and Acting Associate Dean at Pratt Institute, he is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt, where he also directs trans/post/neodisciplinary initiatives in the Office of the Provost. During his residency, Amir will be working on the manifesto of The New Definitely Post/Transnational and Mostly Portable Open Epic, as Rendered by the Elastic Circus of the Revolution, which is comprised of cantos and fragments constituting an on-going multilingual scriptural epic. Since 2007, pieces have been featured at The Bowery Poetry Club and The Riverside Church, during the Uncomun Festival, the Engendered Festival, and the Dumbo Arts Festival in New York, at the Baroquissimo Festival in Puebla, Mexico, and the Paris en toutes lettres festival in Paris in 2010, among other venues. These poetic fragments unfold over time on multiple platforms, in multiple arenas and spaces (private and public), and through various scriptural strategies—from the traditional (handwritten sheets and books) to the new (electronic, web). A theoretical apparatus and a critical enterprise engaged with the history and forms of literature and the reading phenomenon, the work also challenges traditional modalities of publication, exhibition, commodification, dissemination and interaction.
