curation: Fil Ieropoulos

What does publication do? Does it make us feel embarrassed that our vulnerabilities have been publicised? Do we feel ashamed of our past self, who wrote naïve words? Does it make us ashamed in comparison to our past — maybe we peaked? Or does it make us feel powerful, sexy, I wrote this, “after all, I’m a published author” — maybe someone will read us? Maybe we exist?

These days the unit of text subject to “publication” and its anxieties is shorter than ever before. Intellectual property can be a few words: a hashtag, a slogan. Yet somehow the questions around authorship and the painful nature of both writing and silence do not go away. In fact, who hasn’t agonized over whether to send a simple text message, or wished to delete it all? Silence in the digital age is equivalent to absence, to nonexistence. But writing is humiliation, the humiliation of being read and the humiliation of not being read.

This residency explores the difficulties of this dilemma and approaches a solution: what if publication could become more ephemeral? What if we could slip in between the gap of our written texts and our spoken confidences, producing more intimate works that are never fully “published” or “unpublished,” but exist for us and those we love? What if we can enact private, personal words, and explode them onto a wall, a T-shirt, a stage? What if a slogan could become a closely held secret, an archive of life as it’s lived rather than a representation of a brand? What if we could reclaim the local relationship of the spoken word from the authority of language?

Aimée Lê is a Vietnamese American writer and director/performer Her work focuses on the non-translatability and poetic forms of spoken word, specialising in unintelligible projects of fantasy. She has edited poetry collections, she holds a Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London and is one of the founders of the Occupy Dartmouth movement. In 2016, she participated in the Athens project Sound Acts, where she presented a project reworking songs by Greek pop singer Aliki Vougiouklaki.

Aimée Le – Reading, Silence, Slogans is the second event of #TextMe_Lab. The Lab aspires to transform ATOPOS space into a research centre with a series of lectures, discussions, workshops, performances and small exhibitions. All events focus on hybrid languages arising at the intersection of text and other artistic media. Programming themes include: 20th century visual poetry, spoken word performance, the relation between poetry and sound art, and contemporary linguistic phenomena, such as internet pop-culture and new media, and the relation between words and screens.

Schedule:

3 May, 19:00-21:00 – New Book Depression - An interactive workshop within the fluffy library. Participants will explore the fantasies and traumas of publication through found materials and prompts, to produce their own text art and bookworks. The resulting writing will become part of the fluffy fairytale, as we produce and hear the voices and natures of the unpoetic objects and loved ones in our lives. We will turn them into text, slogan, performance, silence.

5 May, 20:00-22:00 – Performance - Aimée will present her work through a showing of large prints and a poetry reading. Her performance will explore the practice of reading text as a public act, as well as the relationship between language, the book as an object and the poet / writer / reader’s performance, from a piece of graffiti to a T-shirt slogan.

Entrance Free

***

Hospitality Sponsors
KTIMA EVHARIS
CITRUS
FIMI DRINKS

Supporting Creativity
NEON

With the support of
Athens Culture Net
Founding donor Stavros Niarchos Foundation

As part of
Athens 2018 World Book Capital