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Flowers for Glissant’s ‘The Black Beach’ — with Bella Meyer — Arranging flowers for Édouard Glissant’s narrative essay The Black Beach, a short text that makes up a chapter of his book, The Poetics of Relation.

Joined by Bella Meyer, florist, and creator of fleursBella

fleursBella is a floral studio dedicated to using flowers and other forms of growth to create connections between people and interpret the stories embedded in other forms of art. Mixing seasonal and market flowers with foraged materials, mosses, bark, and fungi, fleursBella has become known for its ways of looking for beauty in an expansive view of nature, ephemera, and growth.

In addition to arranging for cultural institutions, personal events, and restaurants, the flower studio in the east village of Manhattan doubles as an educational space, hosting classes in flower design, as well as a stage for interdisciplinary performances and parties.

Bella Meyer created fleursBella in 2005. She started working with natural materials in 1992, making chuppahs from found birch tree branches. Some years later she had her first invitation by a major arts institution, Brooklyn Academy of Music, to create large scale arrangements in response to their dance and theatre program. To her, arranging is just another form of storytelling, a continuation of her earlier work making puppets, costume design and her education studying the history of an esoteric figure that populates the capital of columns in many medieval churches, the Atlante figure; the smallest and meekest at the floral crown of the column, bearing the load of the building and symbolically our larger world.

https://www.fleursbella.com/about

(Socialise)

First broadcast on Montez Press Radio as Tongue and Cheek- Ep38: Flowers for Glissant’s ‘The Black Beach’ — with Bella Meyer — Saturday, September 24th, 2022 1-2PM

A radio series of proprioceptive exercises, interviews about practices of communication, and archival sound. A routine for warming up our means of communication. Presented monthly as a combination of live and prerecorded sessions.

Lend me your ears!
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works… Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are' he said. 'Here we are' she said, 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were' he said, 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said. 'Well!' he said, 'well.' "
-- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics”

To reach an arm out of one’s mouth, peek through one’s ear, and speak out of one’s eye. Communication happens by any means possible. It is the different ways bodies extend themselves, as limbs that bridge things—reaching out, stretching and sometimes touching, with a light tap, “Marco!”

How we voice, how we gesture, how we manner, how we empathize.
Exercises to find all ways of thinking of language, and to exercise them as their own paths of communication.

To empathize over radio. Invite to do the same—feel, mimic, echo. “Polo”
The sound of leading, of following, of teaching speaking.
And learning to make a body of a limb.

"Tongue and Cheek" was first developed and aired on Montez Press Radio beginning in the summer of 2018. Montez Press Radio is an experimental radio station and commissioning platform for unexpected works from artists and other creative voices. MPR continues to air new episodes of Tongue and Cheek during its monthly live broadcast at 46 Canal St in Chinatown, New York.