The recording of the launch of Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising, a collaborative work by queer scholar João Florêncio and artist Liz Rosenfeld from the 29th of June 2025. After a reading from the book, Liz Rosenfeld was joined in conversation with Chloe Chignell.
Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/crossings-creative-ecologies-of-cruising
About the publication
Crossings is not your conventional book. It hovers in the charged space between academic inquiry and literary experimentation, between critical manifesto and queer sex memoir—Crossings is an erotic hybrid form that dares to think through desire, with desire. Throughout its chapters the book moves swiftly between different streams of discourse from theoretical conversations to reflections on aesthetic and artistic practice to sensuous descriptions of bodily encounters. The writing darts in and out of these thought spaces with such dynamic that it thoroughly, and pleasurably, disoriented me as a reader and had me pause to ask: what is sex? And what is theory?
In this work, an artist and an academic intertwine their voices in a dialogic exploration of cruising—not only as a sexual practice but as a method of knowing, remembering, and of constructing queer sociality. The book unfolds both the poetic and political forms that cruising enacts. Together Joao and Liz, take queer sex practices seriously as sites of knowledge production, opening up the possibility for other kinds of thinking that occur through the body and in public, in order to enact tenuous and vital spaces of queer community.
About the authors
Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working across performance, moving image, experimental writing, and drawing. Their work explores questions of queer temporality, memory, and emotional and political ecologies, often through the lens of cruising and corporeal excess. Working with what they call "flesh as a non-binary collaborative material," Liz's practice, often auto-theoretical, questions how queer ontologies are grounded in variant and hypocritical desire(s.)
Joao Florencio is a queer scholar currently work at the university of Linkskoping. His research draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary sex cultures. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig published by Routledge, in 2020.
Credits
Introduction and interview by Chloe Chignell
This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo
The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas
This episode brings you the recording of an evening of readings with authors Rosie Stockton and Hannah Baer. The event took place at our space in Brussels on the 7th of June 2025. Rosie and Hannah read from their recent work, followed by a conversation with Chloe Chignell.
Find their books here:
https://rile.space/authors/rosie-stockton
https://rile.space/authors/hannah-baer
About the authors
Both Rosie and Hannah are writers whose work engages rigorously with the poetics of desire, and with how language acts as a site that both makes and unmakes relations.
In different ways, their writing troubles the idea of a coherent, stable, or “good” subject. They approach gender and identity as sites of negotiation, opacity, and play—doing so with a rare mix of clarity, humor, and formal experimentation.
There’s something in both of their work that feels like it emerges from a deeply personal space that’s never fully private: a kind of intimacy that's always entangled with the social. Their writing makes room for contradiction, for not knowing and for desire as its own kind of thinking.
Rosie Stockton is the author of two poetry books Permanent Volta and Fuel. Their poems are full of lyric loops, erotic tension, and deep attention to the structures—both poetic and social—that threaten to both hold and break us.
Hannah Baer is the author of trans girl suicide museum. She writes across genre and form, weaving memoir, criticism, and theory into a writing that is as intellectually cutting as it is emotionally generous.
Credits
Introduction by Chloe Chignell
This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo.
The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas.
For this episode we are delighted to share with you an evening of readings by poets Mia You and Obe Alkema. They read from their latest poetry collections, respectively Festival and Bewogen selfies. The event took place at rile*books on February 14, 2025 in Brussels.
Find their books here:
https://rile.space/authors/obe-alkema
https://rile.space/authors/mia-you
About Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025)
The festival is a space of communion and celebration, a romanticized collision of bodies, music and magic. The revolution will look like a festival, we’ve been told by philosophers, writers, artists, and marketers. But the festival is also, of course, the space of formalizing ideology, ritualizing the consumption and violence that propels existing structures of power.
About Bewogen selfies (het balanseer, 2024)
In Bewogen selfies, Obe Alkema investigates the relationship between landscape and memory. What does he find when returning to important places from his memory? What does he not remember, but Google does? Can a memoir be purveyed from his metadata?
About Mia You
Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025) and I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute.
About Obe Alkema
Obe Alkema is a poet based in The Netherlands. He debuted with Obelisque (2018), a poetry glossy in millennial pink, followed up by another Obelisque in 2022. His 2024 publication Bewogen Selfies is a collection of memoirs about New York, poet Kevin Killian and New Narrative, sex and sexuality, Italy, depression and therapy, and much more. He regularly reviews poetry collections for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and works for the municipality of Utrecht.
Credits
Mixing by Ros Del Olmo
Introduction by Chloe Chignell
Music by ive
In this episode we are sharing a reading by and conversation with Lauren Bakst that took place on the 16th of March 2025 at our space in Brussels.
wetness x surround is a reading of poetic essays and meditations on the submerged materiality of dyke-sex-in-the-city. Spinning centrifugally around research on the Clit Club, wetness x surround skims the ephemera and transmissions of this legendary-to-some 1990s party in New York City where “every single place in the club was for sex.” Through cycles of dissolution and reappearance, by way of withdrawals and refrains, the writing moves in the spirit of the dispossessive impropriety it studies.
Following the reading Chloe Chignell joined Lauren Bakst in conversation.
About Lauren Bakst
Lauren Bakst is a writer, artist, and scholar working in experimental performance and queer studies. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation focuses on the socio-poetics of lesbian sex and erotics. She curates and organizes the School for Temporary Liveness, a para-site for performance and collective study, the next iteration of which will take place at the Kitchen in July 2025. Her writing on the Clit Club is forthcoming in TDR/The Drama Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog Riot.
Credits
This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo.
The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas - @iv.iv.iv.iv.iv.iv
We’re super excited to be able to share the recording of an evening of readings by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha and novelist Sulaiman Addonia. It took place at our space in Brussels on 7th of December 2024.
Nat raha read excerpts from her most recent book apparitions (nines) and Sulaiman Addonia invited simon asencio to read an excerpt from his novel The Seers. the evening concluded with a conversation between the authors.
About apparitions (nines)
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
About Nat Raha
Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, amongst others. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
About The Seers
Suliaiman addonia’s The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.
About Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels, The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019), have been translated into more than twenty languages. Silence is My Mother Tongue was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, as well as the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Enjoy!
For this episode we are excited to share with you the recording of the launch of How to Leave the World, by Marouane Bakhti, which was translated from French by Lara Vergnaud and published by Divided Publishing in 2024. The launch took place at our space in Brussels on the 30th of November last year.
About How to Leave the World
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.
“A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.” Annie Ernaux
About Marouane Bakhti
Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.
Marouane’s reading is followed by a conversation with Oscar Mathieu.
About Oscar Mathieu
Oscar is a cultural worker based in Brussels. He performs, writes, draws, translates, tattoos, researches. His focal points of interest include self-organization, faggotry, and dogs.
For this episode we’re delighted to share with you a recording of Asiya Wadud reading from her latest collection of poetry, Mandible Wishbone Solvent alongside a manuscript-in-progress, titled: Any Want Rings The Circle.
The reading took place at rile*books on the 12 of October 2024.
Mandible Wishbone solvent was published by the university of Chicago press earlier this year. The poems and prose in the collection engage with migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art— though not necessarily in tha t order. Punctuated by images of Asiya’s own original art, offers an indirect meditation on the concepts of the drift and the isthmus ("An isthmus— passageway, a threshold, a deliverance.
About Asiya Wadud
Asiya Wadud is a poet based in brooklyn and the author of 5 collections of poetry: Mandible Wishbone Solvent from this year, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body 2021, A filament in gold leaf and Syncope both from 2019 and Crosslight for a young bird from 2018. She has also been published Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
After the reading we opened the floor to questions from the audience. For technical reasons the audio quality of the questions is not ideal but we wanted to anyway include the conversation in the podcast so we hope you can excuse the slight glichtes in the audio towards the end.
We hope you enjoy listening!
Today we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung that took place on September 28th of this year. Eugene reads from his most recent publication Bitterness and Wit, published by the Asymmetry Art Foundation, London, within the framework of Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung's curatorial fellowship at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. The reading is followed by a conversation with Chloe Chignell.
The titiular story in the collection, Bitnerness an Wit follows a museum worker who feels a profound sense of suffering as he vulgarises language to write jargon-filled wall texts for a contemporary art institution he finds deeply unserious and unrigorous. Amongst other things, he questions the emancipatory valence given to language in certain schools of psychoanalysis, and poses questions to do with whether giving language and form to a series of symptoms can alleviate an experience of suffering tied to something so material, and inescapable, like the wage. The reading is followed by a conversation I had with Eugene in which we discuss his approach to writing fiction and art critisim and his thinking on practices of institutional critique.
About Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, cultural worker, and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. He is particularly interested in anarchist and dissident publication practices, utopian thresholds in language, and literary expressions of the revolutionary consciousness. In 2023, Eugene was the Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he curated the exhibition Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess.
Eugene has been a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, and was previously part of the curatorial and public program teams at the Julia Stoschek Foundation and documenta fifteen, respectively. His writing has appeared in places such as e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, Art+Australia, and more. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC).
Eugene currently teaches critical theory and curatorial practice at Design Academy Eindhoven. Previously, he has given lectures at RMIT’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, UCL Slade School of Fine Art, and Fudan University. Eugene holds degrees in art history, gender studies, and law from the University of Sydney.
Credits
This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via the website rile.space.
For this eposide we’re delighted to share with you a reading by LA Warman and Clara Pacotte that took place in December 2023. This will be our first bilingual episode featuring excerpts of Whore foods in it’s original English interspered with Clara Pacotte’s French translation which was published by RAG editions in 2022.
About LA Warman
LA Warman is a poet, sound artist, and teacher currently based in New York City. Her most recent poetic novella titled Dust was published in 2022 by Inpatient Press. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. where teaches courses on topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Warman is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers and Poets at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement.
About Clara Pacotte
Clara Pacotte is a writer, videoist and researcher. In her work, she develops potential social alternatives by mixing documentary and fiction, middle age and time extrapolation. She thinks about her films and texts as archives of a better future. Pacotte co-founded the group EAAPES in 2017 with Charlotte Houette to investigate feminist and queer issues in science-fiction literature and experimental feminist translation.
Credits
This episode is edited by Ros Del Olmo. Check our events via the website www.rile.space or visit us in Brussels.
Welcome to the rile* book podcast, an archival space for the readings and conversations we host at our space in Brussels. For this episode we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by US based poet Farid Matuk reading from his forthcoming collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible. It was followed by a conversation with Brussel based writer Filip Jakab. The event took place on June 15th 2024.
The poems explore the aesthetic perversions of syntax and rhyme to search for yet unrealized perversions and purities amidst national, sexual, and ancestral orthodoxies.
Enjoy !
About Farid Matuk
A queer writer of Syrian and Peruvian heritage, Farid Matuk has lived in the U.S. since the age of six first as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and now as a “naturalized" citizen. He is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse, and of several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry, in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, among others. Matuk's poems can be found in journals including The Nation, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, Lana Turner Journal, and The Paris Review. Matuk's book arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, was awarded the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize by the Poetry Society of America. His work has been supported by The Headlands Center for the Arts, by a Holloway Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley, and by a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. Matuk’s translations of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta are forthcoming from Graywolf Press and his third collection, Moon Mirrored Indivisible, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2025.
About Filip Jakab
Filip Jakab writes and edits columns, fiction, essays, and celebrity profiles. He is a contributing editor at L.A.-based FLAUNT magazine. He read WHO WANTS IT HOW, his three-month gossip~culture~sex column installment at Spare Wheel, Brussels. IRL column readings are published via SaltOverGold, his Substack claiming: “…imbued with the depth of bleakness, half-journalistic, half-fictional, the column appears as a possibility to reflect on what people in Brussels gossip, but barely anyone has the guts to say it out loud.” He previously read his fiction at CELADOR, Brussels and David Horvitz Garden, Los Angeles. His forthcoming fiction will appear in October 2024 at SPZ gallery, Prague. He is currently writing the draft of his first novel and develops ideas by typing in notes on his phone during morning runs. He was born in Košice, Slovakia, and is based in Brussels, Belgium.
Credits
This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via our website www.rile.space
For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are excited to release the recording of Ariana's reading at rile*, which took place on October 28 2023. Ariana Reines read from her yet unpublished poetry collection The Rose and from her latest book A Sand Book. The reading was accompanied by a conversation with performing artist and writer Stefa Govaart, and a closing q&a with the audience.
Find more information about the book here on our website.
About Ariana Reines
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Ariana’s books include 'A Sand Book', winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & long-listed for the National Book Award, 'The Cow', winner of the Alberta Prize, 'Coeur De Lion', 'Mercury', and 'The Origin Of The World'. In 2012 she created 'Ancient Evenings', an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, as well as 'Lazy Eye Haver,' an astrology practice through which she pioneered new forms of arts and consciousness pedagogy. In March 2020, she created Invisible College, a hub for poetry, art, & sacred study online. Recent performance & teaching projects include 'Divine Justice' (2022), a 25-hour durational performance inspired by Medea at Performance Space New York, and 'Gnostic Poetics', a unique seminar/workshop on the Nag Hammadi library held at Scripps College in 2022. Reines has taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Pittsburgh, among others. She lives in Queens, New York.
About Stefa Govaart
Stefa Govaart works across dance, performance and text. They have worked with and for choreographers and visual artists across Europe, co-organize the artists' gathering Spring Meeting at Performing Arts Forum (St. Erme, FR), and are a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. With Marija Cetinić, they are working on an ongoing epistolary project. They teach at P.A.R.T.S., and live in Brussels.
Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Flaxen" by Dean Blunt
For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are thrilled to release the recording of Alice Notley's reading at rile*, which took place on September 13 2023. Alice Notley read from her recent publication, her six book epic The Speak Angel Series, published by Fonograf Editions in 2023. Marija Cetinić joined in conversation with Alice Notley, opening questions around the genre of the epic, feminism and disobiedence; followed by a closing q&a with the audience.
Further reading and links
You can find more information about Alice Notley's books here on our website.
About the book
The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.
About Alice Notley
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles TimesBook Award, the Griffin Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include Eurynome’s Sandals, Certain Magical Acts,Benediction, and For the Ride. Notley is also a collagist, cover artist, and maker of hybrid art objects. An art book, Runes and Chords, is forthcoming or has already appeared.
About Marija Cetinić
Marija Cetinić is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is coordinator of the MA Comparative Literature program and founding member of the research group Sex Negativity. At Sandberg Instituut, she works as thesis supervisor and writing instructor in the MA Critical Studies program. Since 2022, she is part of the programming collective at Perdu, center for poetry and experiment. With Stefa Govaart, she is involved in an ongoing epistolary project.
Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Borders" by Carmen Villain and Jenny Hval
For this episode of rile* , books podcast we are joined by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Giulia Crispiani to talk about the first English translation of Carla Lonzi’s book Self-Portrait which was translated by Allison herself, with editorial assistance from Giulia. The book was published by Divided Publishing in 2021.
Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.
The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.
Allison Grimaldi Donahue is an American poet, writer and translator currently based in Bologna. She teaches creative writing, translation, and literature at John Cabot University in Rome and Middlebury College Florence and Rome. She is the author of BODY MINERAL (2016) and the co-author of On Endings (2019). Her writing and translations have appeared in The brooklyn Rail, Words without Borders, Flash Art, BOMB and NERO.
Giulia Crispiani is an italian artist and writer living in Rome, where she works as an editor of Nero Editions. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and holds an MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work has been presented at Center for Book Arts, Centrale Fies and FramerFramed among others. She is the author of: What if Every Farewell Would Be Followed by a Love Letter (Union Editions 2020), and What if I can’t say goodbye (Union Editions 2021).
Further Reading and Links
Auto-Portrait, the French translation of the book
Deculturalize, an exhibition about Carla Lonzi
Divided Publishing, their website
Credits
Edited and mixed by Sven Dehens
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by both
Music sample from "I'm Following You" by Félicia Atkinson
Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series, featuring Cinderella's Diaries, a project by Brussels based artist and researcher Sina Seifee, with readings by Bryana Fritz. Over the last few years Sina has been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. More recently Sina started to work with the figure of Cinderella, thinking with her about the human-animal modes of imagination.
From this Sina started to develop a series of texts called Cinderella's Diaries. In this podcast Sina will introduce us to this research and writing practice. Born in Iran, Sina looks at the changes the Farsi dubbed version brought to Cinderella's character. Further Sina looks at Cinderella's position, living in an impossible house, locked in an attic surrounded by animals as her companions. The second half of the episode features readings from the first two diaries, read by dancer, performance-maker and text-worker Bryana Fritz.
Edited by Sven Dehens.
[ Transcript ]
Introduction by Sina Seifee:
"Hello, welcome rile* books podcast, my name is Sina Seifee, I am artist and researcher based in Brussels. Over the last few years I have been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. I have been working with the figure of Cinderella for some time, thinking with her about the human animal modes of imagination.
"Cinderella is part of my imaginary and my heritage, especially the Walt Disney version of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was dubbed masterfully before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voice in Farsi, which was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in Tehrani cabaret voice-performances, has a completely different tonality than its English original. Her articulation sounds much more adult and sexy while the mice speak more “childish.” From a different archetype of a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, she is now part of the older regimes of moral narratives, almost abject with no pedagogical significance unless she is totally refashioned. Disney didn’t change the story so much but made the choice to make the animals the real protagonist of the story. It is hard to imagine that anyone would want to raise their children (regardless of gender) to be like Cinderella, weak.
"From whom should we inherit our practices and how? I prefer Cinderella to be my ancestor. Cinderella is not liberated, but she is also not not-free. She lives in an impossible house with an impossibly terrible family. Why doesn't she become a psycho? Why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she exercises a radical form of freedom that allows her to know more about the animals she lives with. Our imagination, as the audience of the story, depends on her animals. Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? Amateur, meaning the one who develops an expertise in taste. And ethologist, meaning a practical mode of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted).
"In writing Cinderella’s diaries I was interested in getting to know more about how the story changes when the investigator becomes a biographer. And try to think in the rhythms of daily living in Cinderella’s mansion, including the receiving of insult upon insult, pleasure of mending spiderwebs, cutting cat bullshit, feeding illegal mice, and routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals. I was also thinking about contemporary European performative arts, where I am situated. A context in which art is understood, on a fundamental level, as the capacity to resonate otherwise through the body. In other words, art is practiced and evaluated as a source of provocation. I can’t stop thinking that Cinderella’s waiting is not of the same nature of the intensification of the body (in all its differences) that I witness in Europe. If she is not resonating to feel a different world, what is she resonating with?
"Cinderella’s diaries also helped me to invite two issues about the state of precarity that I don’t know yet how to think about. Her problematic relation to precarity reveals two difficulties: the question of hierarchy and the question of waiting. In the story, the most adventurous and the most curious of the animals are surprisingly the ones who are most attached to Cinderella. This is precisely what Cinderella herself performs, learning from her animals, that bravery is not a form of detachment from the environment, it is rather a form of hierarchy. The other issue is about waiting. Cinderella is not a trickster (outwitting her situation by using clever technologies), but a waiter. Under an existential X-ray surveillance her acts reveal what I monitor and recognize as compositional waiting. She waits compositionally while working with full optimism within the precarity of her situation that she has no hope for getting better.
"A Cinderella who does her job engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of the authority of her evil mother. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present. And therefore inviting more interesting questions about her mode of labour. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals, the affirmative register of life as something overwhelming, the involvement of senses in the force of things evil or indifferent, the ability to interpret the weight of a milieu that spreads across cattle with dairy animals and castles with sophisticated princes.
"Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted)."
Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series featuring a conversation between Tessel Veneboer and Mckenzie Wark about her new book 'Philosophy for Spiders, on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker' published september 2021 by duke university press.
Tessel is a phd researcher at the university of ghent, her research ‘The queer potential of fragmentation: sexuality and identity in Kathy Acker’s work’ couldn’t be a better frame to talk to our guest, scholar and writer, Mckenzie Wark. Mckenzie is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Reverse Cowgirl, and Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I’m Very Into You.
Quoting her: “The book contains elements of memoir and criticism, but is neither.” Instead, offering a comprehensive reading of Kathy Aker’s published and archived works, Mckenzie finds in Acker not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender, but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy’s purview.
There are feminist Ackers, punk ackers, queer ackers, kink ackers, avant-gard ackers. In the conversation, they talk about Mckenzie’s proposal to add a Trans Acker to this web as well. Furthermore they talk about the intentions of the book, the why of the low theory, trans-lit, and what Sarah Schulmann calls the growing my-Kathy genre.
The episode features sound from Useless Movement (dub version), a track by Terre Taemlitz and Laurence Rassel, as well as readings by Mckenzie from the book. You can get a copy of the book at www.rile.space, or at our Brussels based store from the end of september on.
Sometime before all closed down last year, Rachel Levitsky came by rile*. We ended up recording a reading from her poetry collection Neighbor (2020, 2009 - Ugly Duckling Press). The second part of the show is a remote recording by Adrian Bridget from his self-published novel Treatment (2019). The novel consists of around 40 Treatments as chapters. Here's a few of them.
Rachel Levitsky came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. In between those two events, she wrote fact sheets and polemic for street actions demonstrating for LGBT and Women’s Liberation, Women’s Health, and against the state negligence of the AIDS epidemic. Since becoming a poet, she’s published three book length collections, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009, 2020) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013). In 1999, she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna Collaborative, a matrix of literary action promoting the writers and writing of the contemporary feminist avant-garde.
Adrian Bridget is a writer and publisher. He is the author of the collection TEXTS THAT SHOULDN’T BE READ OUT LOUD. His first novel — Treatment — was published in 2019. He lives and works in London.
Music clips by O Yuki Conjugate. Edited by Sven Dehens.
Listen back to the audio launch of This Container Edition 08 (2020), hosted by Stefan Govaart and Chloe Chignell. The audio was originally released during The School For Temporary Liveness (2020) in our online reading room (www.rile.space/readingroom).
This Container is a magazine gathering experimental writing from artists working with choreography. With additional music by Mike Ratledge, Odete and O Yuki O Conjugate.
Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.
We are thrilled to release this conversation with Vava Dudu, Alberto García del Castillo and Geo Wyeth, hosted by Marnie Slater. The conversation centers around the publication of the first anthology of poetry by fashion designer, musician, painter, and Paris icon Vava Dudu, published by Tabloid Press in 2020. Vava’s poems are culled from language she prints and publishes on garments, as well as song lyrics from her electro-punk band La Chatte.
The publication brings together texts translated from French to English by New York artist, musician and educator Geo Wyeth, and edited by Castilian writer and curator Alberto García del Castillo. The book was completed in residency at the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR), as part of the public program accompanying a retrospective exhibition of Keith Haring.
Vava Dudu (born August 2, 1970 in Paris) is a multidisciplinary French artist of Martinican origin. In 1998, she worked with Fabrice Lorrain after graduating from the Parisian fashion school Fleuri Delaporte. Marilyn Manson, Bjork, Neneh Cherry, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga and John Galliano are clients and the Galliera museum exhibits their models. With her group La Chatte, she performed in the program Des mots de minuit. She created the motifs and music for the Courrèges fashion show in 2019.
This recording was originally released in August of 2020 with Montez Press Radio.
In the past fifteen years, Krõõt Juurak has developed a series of practices and performances that do not necessarily take place in a theatre or a gallery, at a predictable time or space, but rather come to existence as performative conditions through certain other triggers.
Krõõt Juurak and Galerie (Adriano Wilfert Jensen & Simon Asencio) discuss her newly published monograph Animal, Family, Bad Mood Audience and Sleeping Bad Mood. The conversation provides an insight into Juurak’s singular body of work including Bad Mood, Autodomestication, Performances for Pets and Scripted Smalltalk.
Brought to you by rile*books and Galerie International.