This Page is an Occupied Territory is a limited-edition, tabloid-size newspaper-poem written by poet, cultural critic Adeena Karasick, visualized by author, designer, Warren Lehrer. Composed in reaction to the ongoing occupation, war, slaughter in Gaza/Israel, Karasick’s text and Lehrer’s visuals approach language and the page itself as an occupied territory. This Page investigates: possession of a region and its inhabitants by force—through blockades, barricades, barriers, and other means. In much the same light, translation can be seen as a form of occupation, whereby one language layered onto the body of another, is an act of war. For the word “war,” as both an English noun and a verb meaning “conflict,” and a German adjective [wàhr] meaning what’s “true, real, genuine,” literally places “war” at war with itself. To wit, “wà[h]r” not only “occupies” the homography between the ear and the eye; the babelism at play between speech and writing—but born in “differance,” madness and effacement, the notion of “occupation” points to how what’s “true” is always in conflict.
Karasick presented a live performance of This Page is an Occupied Territory in February, 2024 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Afterwards, she sent the text to Lehrer. Almost immediately, the title and text of Karasick’s poem suggested a visual setting that would involve letterpress printing elements that could be used as blockades, barricades, and border crossings. Lehrer worked with Roni Gross who made prints of various wood and metal characters, blocks of wood “furniture” (normally used to lock-up type to the bed of a press), dingbats, and borders. Lehrer made digital scans of the prints and designed the whole thing as a tabloid-sized publication to be printed at a newspaper house because the ever-expanding war and daily bombardment of devastating news was/is so outsized and all-encompassing. As the poem progresses, the occupied pages within this newspaper poem become more and more boxed in, askew, and rubbled to pieces.
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