Friday September 6, 2013
1 hour music set by Yasmina Haddad
The page is a peculiar place. It contracts and stretches time into space. A year and a single second, worlds built and undone exist on a standard 21 x 29,7 cm rectangle. The architecture of the page follows parameters that don’t apply to physical laws, geographical borders, to the time it takes to transit between two points, to commute and to come back. Yet, words retain the violence that moving, crossing and trespassing can harbor, the lag across time zones, the aseptic lighting of waiting rooms and the sweat of a walk. The authors invited to read at school compose texts where bodies exist in equally alienating and familiar sensorial habitats. They create spaces that do not comply with the laws of physics or with the borders of the nation state. Their narratives are in dialectic with such structures while writing alternative ways a body can exist in the world.
With: Mirene Arsanios, Christopher Perez and Ghalya Saadawi
Mirene Arsanios is a Beirut-based writer and the co-founder of 98weeks Project Space, through which she has recently launched 98editions, a small press dedicated to experiments in prose, poetry and art writing from the Middle East and beyond. She received her MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Her writing has appeared in various publications including Bidoun, Ibraaz, Dolce Stil Criollo and The Rumpus, among others.
Born in the Río Grande Valley of Texas, Christopher Rey Pérez holds degrees in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. He has lived and written in México, Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil. Currently, he is a Visiting Lecturer at Al-Quds Bard Honors College in the West Bank. He is also the editor of a new journal of the Americas, Dolce Stil Criollo.
Ghalya Saadawi is an independent writer and critic living between Beirut and London. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science in London and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University of London. She is a part-time lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the University of St. Joseph also in Beirut. Her reviews and essays have appeared in a number of publications including e-flux, Bidoun, Bidayat, Frieze, Third Text and Jadaliyya, among others.
www.98weeks.net
