Begun in 2018, Pluecker’s Unsettlements project has been motivated by a desire to unsettle settler colonial histories and ways of being, with particular attention to physical sites of relevance in her familial history in Texas. Throughout the project, she has turned to a variety of forms: poetry, essays, lectures, performance, installation, drawing, assemblage, and embroidery, among others.
During her work with her moms—one biological, one queer and adopted—Pluecker was (un)surprised to find that the project itself was unsettled, becoming diffuse and then concrete, disaggregating and then concatenating anew, coming undone and reassembling, as she moved away and returned repeatedly.
In spring 2025, Jadine Pluecker published her piece “The Returns,” which questions and plays with language’s materiality, translation, and multiplicitous transitions: concerns at the heart of Pluecker’s long career as a language justice worker, translator, poet, and artist.
This reading and performance will itself be a return to The Unsettlements, a return to a reassembled site, a return to a physical space with a new iteration and installation of The Unsettlements: Moms. The event begins in the KAM 62 Auditorium.
**Presented as part of Opening Night celebrations for Degrees of Archive: contemporary art and the shape of history on view at Krannert Art Museum (February 4–July 3, 2027).**
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jadine (JD) Pluecker’s undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023) and In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024). JD has published three books of poetry: The Every Wild (Mouthfeel Press, 2024), Grin Go Home / Las provincias internas (Editorial Ultramarina, 2024), and Ford Over (Noemi Press, 2016). From 2010-2020, she worked as part of the transdisciplinary collaborative Antena Aire and from 2015-2020 with the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. JD edits chapbooks with Ugly Duckling Presse’s Señal series, is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant, and has exhibited work at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Project Row Houses, and more.
This event is supported by the Frances P. Rohlen Fund, the School of Art & Design Visitor Series, and Campus Arts Research in the Office for Arts Integration. Krannert Art Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
