Gabriela Denise Frank – How to Live on a Damaged Planet
This week we feature one of the poems Gabriela Denise Frank recorded at Jack Straw as part of her 2025 Artist Support Program project, producing recordings of poems that will appear in installations and public-facing venues. “How to Live on a Damaged Planet” is a cento. Gabriela writes, “I chose this form, which involves stitching together borrowed lines of poetry, because it speaks to the fractured and chimeric nature of our planet and the creatures (humans and more-than-human) who are struggling to adapt to a world disrupted by climate change.”
“How to Live on a Damaged Planet” is made from lines from the two introductions to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt.
The art for this episode is a collage by the artist, titled “Persephone.” For Gabriela, “The analog process of working by hand—cutting images and shapes, pushing elements around on the page, letting them talk to each other and move several times before anything permanent happens—is essential to my approach. For me, mixed media collage is a physical ecotone of exchange between archetypes, symbols, synchronicities, the hand, the mind, the subconscious, and the collective unconscious: an [im]possibility space where creatures and forms that have no earthly business with each other can meet, interact, and react to reveal truths about “reality” more accurately than realism can. The remixed nature of collage reflects the hybridity of the world we live in.”
