The Estate as the Aleph by Artist-in-Residence Francess Archer Dunbar

Drawing on Borges’s short story and concept of “a place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist,” this workshop will ask participants to write short ekphrastic poems or fragments of flash fiction in conversation with the works in the 2025 Deering Contemporary, Unraveled Tales. Featuring both international and Miami-based artists, this exhibition presents site-specific works that invite viewers to reflect on our connection to the land and the stories of the past that shape our present. “Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors,” Borges wrote. “How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?” We will visit different sites over the course of two hours and read poems and short excerpts, and respond with an eye towards bending time and space and embracing the ability of art to soothe and interpret during moments of change and overwhelm.

Participants should bring their own notebooks and writing utensils.

WHEN: Sunday, March 9th, 2025, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Begins at the Richmond Cottage and Stone House courtyard.
FREE with RSVP.

This event is a part of the monthly Meet the AIRs program. Meet the AIRs takes place on the second Sunday of each month.

About the Artist-in-Residence:
Francess Archer Dunbar is a writer, poet, and amateur fortune teller. Her work is place-based, and often draws on her hometown’s strange history, as well as collective anxieties about microplastics, algorithms, rising tides, and other forces of everyday invasion. She teaches and archives student poetry with O, Miami’s Sunroom program in public schools, and previously worked with the Miami Book Fair and served on the
screening committee for the 41st Miami Film Festival. She is a 2025 AICA Fellow and is working on a novel about a flooded art fair.