Louise Dany
Slow Reading Club
14:00
The public will be taken through a series of “choreographies for reading”, which attempt to actively reconfigure the relationships between reader and text, text and text, and reader and reader.
For this session, Slow Reading Club offers up a reader of poems and other texts related to the exhibition ‘I Couldn’t Sleep in My Dream’ by Beatrice Gibson (CA Conrad, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino etc), and a set of choreographies for their collective, bodily reading. Fickle reading, inexpensive reading, unergonomic reading, blind, grasping, four-legged reading. Sweating in the moist heat of yellow intimacy.
The Slow Reading Club is a Brussels-based, semi-fictional reading group initiated by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen in late 2016. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. The group looks at, probes and interrupts “readership” as a way to stimulate the contact zones and relationships in reading. The aim is not deconstruction or even comprehension of the text, but to create a space of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality in favor of intimacy and negotiate agencies with the text.
Slow Reading Club premiered in Brussels at kunstenfestivaldesarts 2017, as part of an evening titled “Before the Codes”. Since then they have presented work in a number of performance, art, and discursive contexts including La Loge, Brussels; Bâtard Festival 2017 (Beursschouwburg, Brussels & Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam); MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Louise Dany, Oslo; Tin Flats, Los Angeles; ESBA TALM, Angers; CalArts, California; and as part of the Montez Press Radio program in MoMA Ps1, New York. Their practice has been the subject of essays published in Etcetra and L’Art Meme. They split their time between Brussels and its various elsewheres.
Henry Andersen is an artist living in Brussels. He studied as a composer of structuralist music in Perth and Berlin before graduating with a Master of Fine Arts from KASK, 2018. Henry produces performances, installations, sound works and printed matter. Henry’s research focusses on intersections between architectures, erotics, and text.
Bryana Fritz is a dancer and choreographer based in Brussels. Her work is situated at the intersection between poetry and performance and most recently does so in duet with the everyday user interface of OS X. Indispensible Blue(offline) is the title that hosted multiple iterations of this inquiry- a performance, screenshot recordings, and publications. She has also worked as performer for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Xavier le Roy, Michiel Vandevelde and together with Henry Andersen is part of the Slow Reading Club.
This event is presented in connection with the exhibition I Couldn’t Sleep in My Dream by Beatrice Gibson (on display in Bergen Kunsthall 25.01-31.03.2019).
Photo: Slow Reading Club, AAGGINR. Bâtard Festival 2017. Beurrschouwburg, Brussels. Photo: Cillian O’Neil