Projects
My work shifts and changes over the years. But the work I do is often in terms of projects: often long and research-based, sometimes shorter and quick, often collaborative. Sometimes this work finds a home in a book or chapbook, sometimes in spaces of visual art, as readings or performances. Sometimes there are lots of connections between this work and my translations. Sometimes the work shows up in multiple forms over the course of its life. Sometimes things are more separate or one-off. Often my work involves collaborations with others: artists, organizers, writers, humans, landscapes, communities.
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2018 - Present
The Unsettlements
Begun in September 2018, The Unsettlements are a new and growing body of work that delve into sites of trauma, violence, and familial memory in Houston and in Texas where seven generations of my settler-colonial family have lived. The project delves into family history and narratives with all of their unreliability and their surprise. An attempt to imagine ways of unsettling genealogical claims, of grounding beyond white nationalism, and of challenging white supremacy and heterosexism.
2010-2020
Antena Aire (2010-2020)
Antena Aire focused on writing, art- and book-making, performance, language experiments, translating, interpreting, and language justice. Antena Aire explored how critical views on language could help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. The core of Antena Aire was Eleana/Jen Hofer and JD Pluecker.
2015-2020
Antena Houston
In 2015, Antena Houston was founded by Marianela Acuña Arreaza, Silvia Chicas, and JD Pluecker to promote language justice by working with organizations, communities and individuals to create dynamic, well-functioning multilingual spaces for small and large groups of people to foster open communication and attentive listening across languages and cultures. The collective primarily worked with Spanish and English but had experience coordinating more diverse language combinations.
Operating from 2015 through 2020, the members of Antena Houston were Marianela Acuña Arreaza, Silvia Chicas, Maria Eugenia Ferreira, JD Pluecker, José Eduardo Sánchez, and Hannah Thalenberg.
2017
2016
Amigos falsos / False Friends
A collaboration from 2017 between Jorge Galván Flores and John Pluecker. Initially an installation at the Wedge Space at Houston Community College - Southeast Campus and then featured at Diverseworks as part of Lines Drawn . An examination of the limits, joys and travails of false friendship, both linguistically and culturally. The work in the show thinks about el viaje/the voyage, Mexico/Texas, and more broadly the meaning of a word in one language and its relationship to a similar sounding work in another. Moving beyond prescriptive linguistic judgements, the work flows between English and Spanish, creating a space for play, persuasion and laughter.
Karankawa Carancahua Carancagua Karankaway
A collaboration between Nuria Montiel and John Pluecker for an installation at Project Row Houses during Round 44: Shattering the Concrete: Artists, Activists and Instigators, curated by Raquel De Anda in spring 2016. A collaborative visual and sound poem that meditates on language and memory in the context of colonial structures of power that attempt to erase one of the indigenous cultures that inhabited Southeast Texas: the Karankawa. This project grew out of the Anti-Glossary, a pamphlet in an artist book Ioyaiene that eventually became part of my book Ford Over.
2016
2013
Ford Over
My first full-length book, published by Noemi Press in 2016.
Cut up and aggregate and mashup: made of language drawn from the multilingual chronicles of colonial agents who traveled through the land now known as the state of Texas. At the heart of the book is the mystery of the physical act of crossing a river.
The book was the result of years of seven years of work, not just on the page, but also in performances, collaborative work with musicians, and more.
READ
A collaborative performance by Autumn Knight and John Pluecker from 2013. A union of movement, poetry, improvisation, reading and writing. A site-specific response to two spaces: Tony Feher’s Free Fall exhibit at Diverseworks and Autumn Knight’s futz: a research method installation at Project Row Houses. An embodied conversation across two locations around ephemerality, generational legacy and fantasy. An investigation into the intersection of writing and the body.
2012
Meaning in Motion
A collaboration with Pablo Giménez Zapiola along the train tracks of Southwest Houston. Zapiola's Meaning in Motion project entails large-scale projections of words, literary passages and poems onto moving trains, as well as from a moving car onto the environment (houses, trees, buildings, fences, freeways, etc.). For this collaboration, Zapiola projected part of an untitled poem from my book Ford Over onto the side of a passing train.
That Idea of Everything
An audio piece done for Carrie Schneider's Hear Our Houston project. A walk with my father from Jefferson & Baird to Lawson & Broadmoor in Houston's East End.
Not so much a tour to make things more legible, but a remnant of a walk, an audio piece standing in for the lack of a tour.
2011
Day in You
A live performance of what eventually became a section of my book Ford Over for Politiqueer with Voices Breaking Boundaries in Houston in November 2011.
Camera at the event was by Yunuen Perez-Vertti and video editing of the documentation was by Stephanie Saint Sanchez.