Lina Pallotta's much anticipated Tongue on Flames captures the underground poetic energy that pulsed through New York from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, featuring Pallotta's photographs and texts by key figures from that scene.
Tongue on Flames is a nocturnal dive into New York's spaces dedicated to poetry: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, St. Mark's Church, Fez Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, and many others.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe—founded to give a stage to artists traditionally underrepresented in mainstream media and culture—became the cradle of New York's weekly Poetry Slams: audience-judged poetry battles that were part performance, part competition. Bob Holman, a poetry activist, was the witty, humorous, and bold slam-master of the Friday Night Slams. He would later go on to found the Bowery Poetry Club.
The movement itself began in Chicago in 1986, launched by poet Marc Kelly Smith. Poetry Slams are improvised battles of spoken word poetry, a free and lively stage where great artists and unknown voices share the same space. They embrace a wide spectrum of styles, cultural roots, and approaches to writing and performance. Audience participation is at the heart of it all. As Holman once said, "judges picked whimsically from the audience […] rate the poem between 0, a poem that should never have been written, and a 10!, a poem that causes mutual simultaneous orgasm throughout the audience."< Tongue on Flames brings together an extensive selection of Pallotta's photographs and seven textual contributions from defining voices of the era—Bob Holman, Paul Beatty, Patricia Smith, Janice Erlbaum, Pedro Pietri, Sapphire, and John Giorno—alongside a critical essay by Michele Bertolino.
An Italian documentary photographer born in 1955 in San Salvatore Telesino (BN), Lina Pallotta moved to New York in the late 1980s where she received her diploma in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the Center of Photography. Her fierce motivation to make a difference drew her to the underground scene, to subcultures, to Mexican women, to underdogs, to tell stories that normally don't get told. Her most notable works include Porpora e Valerie (2013) and BASTA – To Work and Die on the Mexican Border (1999), on the lives of Mexican women who work in border factories.
Her work has been shown in personal and collective exhibits in Europe and the United States and published in national and international magazines.
