9th May Saturday 2-4pm

Jennifer Boyd and Alex Borkowski
Reading Matter: ‘The room was the portrait of an empty stomach’

Reading Matter is a project by curated by Jennifer Boyd and Alex Borkowski launching this summer with a series of site-specific readings of literary prose and creative theory. We intend to turn the intimate gesture of reading aloud to texts that are more often skimmed and fragmented through isolated study and reappear as academic citations. In contrast to the competitive intellectual unpicking that often comes to dominate more conventional reading groups, we intend to stage a collective decanting by allowing our tongues to trip over strange and refined grammatical structures – reading and valorising complex texts through their oral and sonic matter.

For our inaugural series, we have chosen to curate a selection of events around The Passion According to G.H. (1964) by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. This text presents an account of a woman’s existential transformation unfolding in a stark room in a lofty apartment through various encounters (a painted mural, the body of a cockroach). Not only is the intricate prose of Lispector’s distinctively sensuous modernism worthy of verbalisation, but the way in which she conjures a reader in her address as a critical part of the text makes this a compelling first text for reading with others. The assemblage of texts which follow in the series will be multifaceted, selected in response to various formal and thematic aspects of this primary work.

We are proposing to host our pilot event, a reading of excerpts from G.H., as part of ‘How to Write: Reading Groups’ at Five Years. We believe the white room of the Gallery (which – like G.H.’s apartment – is situated high above the ground and exposes the ‘guts’ of the building) will be a germane site for this ‘read’. The room will be set up with a circle of chairs – participants will be able to come and go, sit on a chair and read, or sit on the floor in the middle of the circle and listen as they so choose. We will stop 10-15 minutes before the end of our time slot to allow for an informal discussion among the participants. We are eager to see what kind of questions and observations arise when participants have digested a text collectively and durationally, and have had a chance to exercise their voices together: what will be said when there is less apprehension about hearing ones own voice? We are also very keen to get some feedback regarding the format and exercise itself so that we can bear this in mind for the rest of the series: will this experiential event act as a levelling space, which incites different or more fruitful discussions than more academically-structured reading groups? Through reading with others will we arrive at unexpected insights, and become conscious that certain parts of the text stir a collective appreciation or affect?

 

Contact: matterreading@gmail.com
www.reading-matter.tumblr.com