an introduction

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Jeanne Gerrity | Curator, The Prince of Homburg: A Solo Exhibition by P. Staff at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Christa Cesario | Manager of Public Programs, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

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On view at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco in the spring of 2026, P. Staff’s video installation, The Prince of Homburg, offers sleeping and dreaming as a form of resistance, while centering the perspectives of prominent queer and trans scholars and activists. The work is loosely based on the 1810 play of the same name by Heinrich von Kleist, which features a weary sleepwalking political dissident. While talking in his sleep, the prince confesses a desire to live differently—a sentiment that resonates today when the very act of existence as a non-conforming body is both exhausting and an act of rebellion. 

True to YBCA’s spirit of collaborative dialogue around the questions of our time, we are thrilled to partner with Small Press Traffic on OMENS. In this folio, four Bay Area writers—Marcel Pardo Ariza, Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert, Mara Hassan, and willow wilderness hour—respond to P. Staff’s The Prince of Homburg through newly commissioned texts which move between reflection, resistance, and reimagination. Performed live within the exhibition space on June 3, 2026, the texts now live on in OMENS. 

‍The Prince of Homburg engages with many different art forms, with writing integral to the work—so it feels fitting that local writers engage with the exhibition in this way. The four pieces in this folio radiate outward from the ideas that arise in the work. They are urgent, pensive, passionate, and—each one—an act of resistance.

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Maxe Crandall | Director, Small Press Traffic

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When I first visited P.Staff’s installation at YBCA, I spent time with the materials in the reading nook, a perfect primer for the conversations that unfold in the film. Books on view include On Being Human as Praxis by Sylvia Wynter, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner, and On Hell: A Novel by Johanna Hedva, who is in the film. I love encountering spaces for reading in galleries; they display circles of influence, suggesting how visual art is inspired by writing and emphasizing the conversational foundations of artistic creation.

P.Staff is also a poet. In the reading nook, I read P’s book of sexy, adamant poems and holographic text, Minimum World (Bierke/After 8 Books 2025):

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… if it’s not me

I am it

It is it 

Huh?

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And if 

I am not it then

Fuck it i am

Not it,

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Two animals, you and you

Shit, and not it

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I am not it

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And if it is

Not

Me

Then it is buried

If it is buried

It is buried

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And i have nothing

Wet salt

Nothing

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Eat clean ass only and I have nothing…

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All this time I thought the title OMENS just came to me, but last week I looked at P’s book again and there it was: a section of poems called “Catherine, Omens.” The word must have imprinted on me in my encounter with the installation.

An omen can be anything that seems to foretell the future, same as trans people become anything and foretell the future. To survive as a trans person is to read signs across time. In this folio, the general usage of the word (predictive omens ordered through the moralizing dichotomy of good or bad) gets dragged. The omen is some thing that sutures past and future through a significant encounter, and then gets you some where else. Trans omens of the portal, the escape hatch, the lived dream.

In this folio, The Prince of Homburg inspires four distinct worlds. The writers cut across Staff’s film from an array of perspectives, styles, politics. Snowflake Arizmendi-Calvert’s interdisciplinary practice collides with Staff’s political formal mash-up, opening the work through memory and meditation on coloniality, indigenous knowledge, and a call for a kind of wild safety. willow wilderness hour rides Staff’s themes of sleep and fantasy with a shared sensibility in representing trans life through our own devised codes. Mara Hassan’s piece extends the mood of the film, taking us into the realm of what I would call sexy trans gothic hallucination. And finally, Marcel Pardo Ariza closes out the folio with observations on queer and trans togetherness, weaving in quotations from the film to hold and tend to trans love, friendship, and life.

This folio traces the aftereffects of the encounter between writer and artist. Each act of response extends the circle of influence, always toward the next reader, who might echo I received this, I am carrying it, here is what it opened in me. 

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