Eight-Track

Poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei's Eight Track is a transliterary exploration of traces. Sound recordings, surveillance cameras, desert geoglyphs, drone operators, refugee interviews, animal imprints, and audio signals manifest moments of inspired wonder, systems of power, slippages, debris. In "the great era of seeing" when the boundary between tracking agent and monitored subject is worn thin by politics and commerce, Eight Track assembles a set of discordant melodies, polyphonic voices, transcriptions, theatres, and images in a struggle to hold on to agency and awe. Stirring from languages of oppression to languages of resistance, Eight Track echolocates the nameless, the noisy, the scattered, and the voiceless. This is ultimately a book of relations - of each of us to each other, to other life forms, to environments, to cultures, to the obsolete and the absolute, to the animal vitality we share.

About the Author :
Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves poetry, translation, photography, sound, and performance to explore an expanded idea of language (whether textual, visual, aural, etc.) as reverberatory and evolutionary, polylingual and polyphonic poetics, historical structures, borders and movement. Her six poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012, A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015). Recent sound-performance works include EIGHT OVER TWO (2019, Semi Silent Award) and OPERATOR (2018), and she is currently writing a libretto for a one-act opera (FAWN, Toronto). She has also translated eight books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, including Bertrand Laverdure's Readopolis (Book*hug, 2017, Governor General Literary Award). Based in Montreal, Avasilichioaei frequently crosses borders to perform her work in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and she was the 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. See www.oanalab.com.

Review :
"Avasilichioaei is one of the sharpest intermedia and translation artists working in Canada today. Creating deliberate forms of 'interference' across multiple metaphorical registers and heterogeneous materials, her newest work also 'interferes' suggestively with conventional book form." —Alberta Views ~||~ "One of the many strengths of Avasilichioaei’s practice is that a reader can pick up the material object that is the book and flip through its pages, then transform into a listener attending the public, sensory expansion of the book’s words into sound, while simultaneously morphing into a viewer of art, a critical thinker, and even a participant implicitly invited to adapt one of the poems as a script for further improvisation and production." —Montreal Review of Books ~||~ "Breathtaking" – Klara du Plessis