Walk Walk Only

With dancers Luca Seixas, Anton Skaaning Thomsen, Lilian Steiner, Johanna Tengan
Followed by a conversation with Valentina Desideri.

You’re invited to a public rehearsal and the first reading of ‘Walk Walk Only’, a poem-as-choreographic-score in Jason Wee’s new poetry collection ‘Dance, Time’ (2025). ‘Dance, Time’, comprising of two long poems, and concerns itself with the entanglements between bodies, movement, the force and direction of desire, and time. In ‘Walk Walk Only’, the poem reads the forms and conditions of a poem—its negative spaces on the page, its caesuras, its compression—as denotations for changes in rhythm or beats, in distance or in spacing and positions, or in time and speed, or as instructions. Crucially, the poem-score draws lessons from close observations and participation in public cruising that Wee has done, especially during the COVID years.

Interpreted together with dancers from Cullbergbaletten, this rehearsal opens the work into movement, gesture, and rhythm. The poem becomes a set of shared instructions—read, tested, and negotiated in real time—opening an exploratory space between poetry and choreography.

The presentation is followed by a conversation with Valentina Desideri, an artist and a researcher at the Centre for the Arts and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm) at the Royal Institute of Arts & HDK-Valand in Sweden. She holds a PhD in Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), a Master of Fine Art (Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam) and a Bachelor of Arts in Dance-Theatre (Laban, London).

Desideri explores artmaking as a form of study and study as a form of making art. She performs Fake Therapy and Political Therapy and is one of the co-organizers of the Performing Arts Forum in northern France. She explores writing with Stefano Harney, engages in Poethical Readings, organizes Sensing Salons and Reading with Echo with Denise Ferreira da Silva, among many other collaborations.

Jason Wee is an artist and writer based in Singapore, working across contemporary art, architecture, poetry, and photography. His practice questions singular authority in favour of polyphony and difference, transforming historical and spatial narratives into visual and written forms. He is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artist space and library in Singapore focused on curatorial experimentation, new writing, and design propositions, and co‑founder of Proud Spaces, a community‑centred cultural initiative. Currently artist in residence at IASPIS, Wee is developing research on the figure of the cannibal, regional urban histories, and changing notions of “the people,” including the histories of Asian object collections in Sweden. During his residency, he is also writing new poems and a performance‑lecture script. His work has recently been presented at the Changwon Sculpture Biennale (2024), SAVVY Contemporary (2024), and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022). Previous exhibitions include Para Site (Hong Kong), Asia Society Museum (New York), the Singapore Biennale, ArtScience Museum (Singapore), and others. He is represented by Ames Yavuz Gallery in London and Singapore.

Photo: Alexandra Ivanciu

Valentina Desideri