"Both poetry and science name things to bring them into being"
A Q&A with Abou Farman
Abou Farman’s work explodes the conventional boundaries between art and science, poetry and scholarship, and the textual and the visual. An anthropologist of science and technology, Farman has exhibited installation and video art as part of the duo caraballo-farman and has published two previous genre-bending books: Clerks of the Passage (2012) and On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020). His latest book, No Silence in the Afterlife, is out today from Noemi Press and includes the poem “Nuclear Magnetic,” which originally appeared in Issue Seventeen of The Drift. To celebrate the publication of No Silence in the Afterlife, Poetry Assistant Hua Xi spoke with Farman about MRIs, protons, and ontological undertakings.
The book’s structure allows it to be read from both ends. How did you construct it, and what does that mean to you?
I didn’t plan it like that. I didn’t plan any of it, really. There were notes; performance texts; medical documents; my artwork; and the artwork I did with Leo, my partner whose illness and death led to our experiments in dying, mourning, and the afterlife. As I compiled the material, it became clear that it was not holding together — that there were too many unintegrated kinds and genres. I had to cut, but I also couldn’t cut it all out. There was research I liked and material that the collection as a whole needed, even if it was too formal or pedantic — all the stuff, for example, on the origins and technologies of the MRI. So I turned to the academic bag of tricks and pulled out footnotes. I split the page in two and the notes ran across the bottom. But it seemed banal and ineffective. It got me going on a useful track, though, namely the poetics of the footnote. How do footnotes function within the conventions of language and text, what else can they do, and how do they add poetry to scholarship rather than simply serve as additional information or mandated citations? One day, when I was formatting the footnote section I saw an option for “endnote.” Obviously. How could I not have thought of it? These should be endnotes since this is about endings. At the same time, I didn’t want that writing to be relegated, like the secular dead, to some neglected netherworld. So I realized that what I had in front of me was a life with two connected beginnings/endings, and one should open life from both ends. It became a structure that reflected the point of the book itself. Also, I never liked calling it a book, but that’s another story.
Tell us about your use of scientific language throughout the book — you draw from physics, biology, medicine, and more.
In my day job, I was an anthropologist of medicine and a science and technology studies (STS) scholar. I did my research on technoscientific immortality. So I carried that with me. For a long time, I was a good secular lefty, so science was the language of reality I learned and leaned into. Poetry was a way to break away from the restrictions of all that we call the real. It is such a strange thing, poetic language in a material world. WTF?! I had influences from poets like A.R. Ammons and Will Alexander, who traveled the vernacular and cosmic scientific domains, but the interplay of those worlds, their merging, became increasingly important to me as I explored non-Western, non-secular histories and cosmologies. Science has a lot of odd aspects, and one of its odd aspects is that so much of it is made up of or through language. But it is also — and perhaps often despite itself — an exploration of the oddness of the universe itself. In this case, the oddness of it came to me and Leo through research on how MRIs functioned. The MRI mapped a fantastic technological continuum between the body and the universe. From protons up, or on, or out. A physicist once told me that protons can’t get destroyed. That was it. Protons became for me a way to reckon with origins and continuity and the afterlife. Not the only way, but one way — going from the smallest and most primordial physical thing to the expansiveness of existence, life, language, and mind.
The work seems to collapse dimension, placing biological and cellular patterns in conversation with contemporary geopolitical patterns and even larger cosmic patterns in the universe. How did you think about scale?
The big questions become much more intense the smaller they get. And the small questions become much more mysterious the larger they get.
List poems and lists of terms appear frequently, including in your poem “Nuclear Magnetic,” which was published in The Drift. How did you put these together, and what is their significance?
Both poetry and science name things to bring them into being. These disciplines are ontological undertakings. And from the ground of that ontology they take flight, though in different ways. Science has possibly named more things in the world than any other language — that is its power and its arrogance. Most contemporary poetry is much less arrogant, but it still describes things we didn’t have names for. Religions and cosmologies are often like that — naming is an act of self-constitution. Or world-making.
I felt that, in the face of death, of disappearance, naming things that make us up — made us up, that made up Leo and me, made up the disease and the survival — was important. I see behind every appearance a disappearance, too; every named thing hosts a world unnamed.
You illustrated the book yourself; what was the process like?
Leo and I worked as artists — under the name caraballo-farman — so the visual was always a part of how we grappled with our lives, and in this case with illness and death. We did a whole series of works visualizing cancer, 3D printing tumors, and playing with the pink-washing commercialization of cancer. Then we did a film (Icaros: A Vision), along with our friend Matteo Norzi, that combined some of these ideas and visuals. For Leo, life was always visual; the image prior to language was how she took in and put out the world. Cancer and dying turned into experiments in that realm. So until the very end and beyond, we were fully imbricated in the world of images.
The images, then, are not all my own. One set comes from a series in our cancer/3D project, called “carcinodaemons,” where the visualization of tumors through 3D meshes turned them into creatures or constellations that some other instrument, like a telescope or a microscope, might see somewhere close or far in the universe. Another set comes from the great Shipibo artist Sara Flores — an artist whose work Leo saw in the Amazon but whom she never got to meet. The Shipibo Conibo Center of New York, which we co-founded with Matteo, took on the project of breaking the barriers that prevented Amazonian indigenous artists like Sara from participating in the contemporary art world. Sara is now an artist celebrated around the world for her brilliance. The other set is just me visualizing one version of Leo’s protons put together in the body of a cockroach. I established a relationship with this cockroach and have tons of video and images.
The design and illustration were also collaborative. I did the initial draft but various people — Sara’s niece, Fiorella; one of my anthropology students, Isabel Arciniegas Guaneme; and the great designer of the book, Steve Halle — put those bits together into the full design.