14 February 2018, 17:00–20:00 / Casco HQ
If you would like to sign up for ReadingRoom, please do so by Monday, 5 February, indicating also if you will join for the vegetarian dinner that follows the session. As in the past, we ask a contribution of €10 per person for the dinner. (Please know that signing up for dinner means that a plate is prepared for you, so if you cannot make it despite signing up, do let us know by Monday, 12 February!)
There’s no need to sign up for the film, just come along – we hope to see you there!
Together with our long-term collaborator Terra Critica, we are excited to invite you to the first ReadingRoom session of 2018. The event launches the reading group’s fourth iteration titled un/learning: the p/re/distribution of knowledge, a thematic series that will carefully and critically traverse topics related to access, excess, and distribution of knowledge over the coming year. It is inspired by the core themes of The Library of Unread Books by Heman Chong and Renée Staal and Army of Love by Dora García and Ingo Niermann, on view until Sunday, 25 February.
The ReadingRoom series un/learning: the p/re/distribution of knowledge is prompted by how libraries host, organize, and maintain knowledge and, more broadly, will take up questions concerning access to, institutionalization of, and the distribution of knowledge in its many forms. For feminist, decolonial and anti-capitalist struggles, the p/re/distribution of knowledges — linked to unlearning our habits of embodied thinking and acting — is a key tool of critical practice and commoning.
More specifically, the intention of this first session is to engage with the question: What does it mean to un/read and un/learn in the present, to not only sense what has remained in the underground, but also un-read old ways of meaning-mattering? The session takes place in the Possibility Room of The Library of Unread Books and will be joined by artist Annette Krauss, long-term collaborator and founding member of Read-in. Krauss will speak about the artistic research project with the Casco team Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) which, in her own words, is “an active critical investigation of normative structures and practices that seeks to become aware and get rid of taken-for-granted ‘truths’ of theory and (daily/habitual) practice.”
The ReadingRoom session opens with a screening of the film The Joycean Society by Dora García, who is a leading participant in Army of Love and an artist whose practice is largely influenced by literature and the act of reading. The Joycean Society, according to Brussels-based production and distribution platform Auguste Orts, “tells the story of a group of people who have been reading a book together for thirty years … with each journey from the first to the last page taking eleven years. Once they reach the last word, an enigmatic ‘the,’ they begin again with the first word, ‘riverrun.’ The text appears inexhaustible, its interpretation endless, the inconclusive nature of the reading exciting. The world seems to cease existing outside this reading room or, perhaps, it exists because of it.”
