concern of future/the present: hello

a chapbook by Arthur de Oliveira

about the book:

In a hand-bound, numbered, limited edition, concern of future/the present: hello is a chapbook that journeys through languages and places without those two things necessarily matching up. A wonderful first project for JARA Collective! So the work comes from making mistakes that we might think of as productive, poetically and linguistically. But this isn’t an “I can say anything I want” book of experimental verse that tries to possess every language it comes across. The verse Arthur writes is sensitive, attuned to poetry as a kind of fumbling and very human pedagogy and epistemology: a way to learn and a way to know, as if those two things are actually one. Cataloguing a favorite filmmaker, tracking the details of a museum visit, a language lesson, and even taking in the language of self-help, the work reads like post-homage homage in its sincerity without pathos. True to its title, concern of future . . . wants to say “hello” and to do so honorably and possibly in your language, dear reader.

about the author:

Arthur de Oliveira is a filmmaker, poet, and theater practitioner from Limeira, São Paulo, Brazil. Over the past sixteen years Arthur has been traveling between the United Arab Emirates, where he is based, and Brazil. Arthur’s travel and varied cultural exposure has sparked his interest in multidisciplinary art forms that create hybrid art pieces much like the multicultural environment he was raised in. His work is often focused on investigations of the consequences of globalization on the individual level. Arthur recently worked with the NYUAD Art Gallery as a curatorial assistant, and is currently participating in the Jameel Art Center’s Youth Assembly Take Over. Arthur’s poems and prose have been published in Postscript and Airport Road Magazines, and his latest short film When Grown Wild and Far was officially selected for the “Festival de Cinema no Meio do Mundo” and “Lisbon Film Rendezvous” film festivals.