Doors 6:30p
Program 7:00p
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Jun 29, 2025 at 7:00 pm
We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense
Readings by Mike Lala, Meg Fernandes, Séamus Isaac Fey.
Organized with Christine Larusso & Rachael Rakes.
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY
UnionDocs is thrilled to present the first iteration of a brand new event series — We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense, a live, shape-shifting series that defies genre and expectation brought to you by poet Christine Larusso & writer and curator (and current UNDO Fellow!) Rachael Rakes! WS2DOATN is not quite ekphrasis, not quite reading, not quite performance—rather, it’s a porous and unpredictable encounter between words, sounds, moving images, and everything else that slips through.
In June, we’ll be thinking about: 💫Failure💫
This edition features readings by Mike Lala, Meg Fernandes, and Séamus Isaac Fey, whose contributions will shape and respond to the theme in real time, with a brief lofi introductory presentation by Christine Larusso.
Xandra Ibarra‘s Fuck My Life will bring us into the world of film, it’s an expanded short film based on her performance by the same name.
Each edition begins with the prompt of one word or phrase —from English and several other languages, which will be turned about through the program—with the composition of works, live performances, and other interjections openly combining with the desperate hells and imaginaries of the day. From this, we aim to follow the threads that unspool from this combination of fragments, feelings, artworks, and impermanence of the moment, guests, and audience.
Expect loosely held structure, provisional logic, and a refusal to resolve. We’ll be thinking out loud in the company of fragments, feedback, and fleeting forms, come through!
Program
Intro, Christine Larusso
Reading, Mike Lala
Fuck My Life, Xandra Ibarra
3:40 mins, 2012
“Fuck My Life,” named after Ibarra’s full-length performance work of the same name, follows a sordid and fatigued showgirl as she sluggishly awakes to make up with yet another day.
Reading, Meg Fernandes
Winner by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
15:43 mins, 2002
Winner is a fictional interview gone awry, featuring a reticent sweepstakes winner who doggedly avoids receiving her prize and manages to morph an ad spot into a mini documentary about her art work.
Shot in a day and largely improvised, Winner is the first collaborative video by Dodge and Kahn. Featuring Kahn as “Lois,” an attention-starved Angeleno, and Dodge as the cameraman who indulges her, Winner established a formative role-playing between them: a symbiotic relationship between camera and subject, indigenous to the world’s entertainment capital. In Winner, Lois gets her fifteen minutes in the spotlight when she wins a cruise through a radio call-in show. The sponsoring station deploys a cameraman, “Peter,” to record a clip of her thanking them for the prize, but Lois is more intent on showing him her sculptures, on display in the trunk of her car. They look like assemblages of flotsam, clumsily held together with duct tape. Peter initially tries to steer Lois back to the task at hand, but her desperation to have an audience—any audience—is so achingly palpable that he doesn’t have the heart to shut her out. He drifts with her into a nearby park, where Lois begins to talk of future film collaborations, and divulges a project in development, an adaptation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video, with wind and bird sounds layered over it. More than a parody of a L.A. wannabe, Lois is a complex character, as dangerously zealous and needy as Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy.
Reading, Seamus Isaac Frey
You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out, A.L. Steiner + Zackary Drucker, with Van Barnes and Mariah Garnett, 2008
8:45 mins, 2008
You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out was made in collaboration with Van Barnes, Zackary Drucker and Mariah Garnett. In it, two trans-identified women share moments of love, insult, and masochism, exchanging both kiki and kai kai languages. Their syncopated exchanges oscillate from hateful to loving, blurring the distinction between lover and enemy – a position that both women seem to share. The two characters prepare each other for a larger, more dangerous culture of intolerance and violence, occupying multiple roles and preparing on all fronts as they appropriate and enact the fetishistic language of sex ads, assault the spectator, antagonize (“read”) each other, and ultimately regain their agency.
Program Duration: 75 mins
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
Mike Lala grew up in the western United States and Tokyo, and lives in New York.
He is the author of the poetry volumes The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023) and Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016); the chapbooks Points of Return, In the Gun Cabinet, and Twenty-Four Exits: A Closet Drama; and a contributing translator to Tales of Dionysus: The Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula.
Lala’s works for performance and installation include Whale Fall (2021–22, with Iris McCloughan and Nobutaka Aozaki), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), and Infinite Odyssey (2018, with Homer). He has presented work at the 92nd Street Y (for Anne Carson’s Tenth Muse), The Knitting Factory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, New Ohio Theatre, Pioneer Works, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, The Tank NYC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Megan Fernandes is a South Asian American writer living in NYC. She was born in Canada and raised in the Philadelphia area. Her family are East African Goans.Fernandes has work published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, PANK, The Common, Guernica, theAcademy of American Poets, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015) and Good Boys (Tin House, 2020). Her third book of poetry, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House), was published in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and critical theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is represented by Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group.
Séamus Isaac Fey (he/him) is a Trans writer from Chicagoland. Currently, he is the poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine. His debut poetry collection, decompose, is out with Not a Cult Media. He has an essay in Dopamine Press’ WITCH anthology (2025), edited by Michelle Tea. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Offing, Sonora Review, and others. He loves to beat his friends at Mario Party. Find him online @sfeycreates.
Rachael Rakes is a writer, curator, educator, and researcher. She was recently the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2023. Currently Rakes is a Committee Member of the New York Film Festival, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Contributing Editor for INFRASONICA.With Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe, she organizes the artistic research initiative on co-subjective encounters, Counter-Encounters. From 2019–2022 she was the Curator for Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Until 2019, she was the Head Curator and Manager of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam. Rakes teaches in the Artificial Times Masters department at Sandberg, on Curating the moving image at Leiden University, and taught recently for the Parsons School of Art, Zine Eskola, HKU, KASK, Eugene Lang College, and Harvard University. Rakes is editor of the publications This, Too, Is a Map (2023, Sema/[NAME]), Toward the Not-Yet (2021, BAK/MIT Press), and Practice Space (2019, [NAME]/De Appel) and frequently publishes as a critic and essayist.
Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Volume, the Colorado Review, Wildness, the Los Angeles Times, the Literary Review, Pleiades, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace, and was a co-founder of the Commonplace School. She lives in Los Angeles most of the time.
From the Event
