Event details

André Breton’s visit to the Hopi Mesas in August 1945, the month the United States dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turned into a crossroads for him and for surrealism. This talk examines what the author of the Manifestoes of Surrealism called the “Hopi Notebook” together with his “Ode to Charles Fourier,” written at the same time on the same trip, show about his perspective that fateful August, as caught “between the atomic mirage and Fourier’s image,” while traveling across the American West in order to satisfy one of his “greatest and oldest desires, which was to meet the Indians, particularly the Pueblo Indians (Hopi and Zuni)."