Featuring new conversations with and readings by artists and poets, as well as recordings we've made over the past years of rile* projects. rile* is a Brussels based bookshop and project space for performance and publication, hosted by Sven Dehens and Chloe Chignell. More info at www.rile.space.
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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 !
This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via our website www.rile.space
About Farid MatukA 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 JakabFilip 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.
Ariana Reines, The Rose, A Sand Book
Saturday, February 10, 2024 • Duration 01:40:25
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.
About Ariana ReinesAriana 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 GovaartStefa 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.
CreditsEdited and mixed by Ros Del OlmoIntro and outro by Chloe ChignellRecording by rile* teamMusic sample from "Flaxen" by Dean Blunt
Alice Notley, The Speak Angel Series
Saturday, February 3, 2024 • Duration 01:08:28
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 LinksYou can find more information about Alice Notley's books here on our website.
About the bookThe 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 NotleyAlice 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 CetinićMarija 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.
CreditsEdited and mixed by Ros Del OlmoIntro and outro by Chloe ChignellRecording by rile* teamMusic sample from "Borders" by Carmen Villain and Jenny Hval
Carla Lonzi's Self-Portrait, with Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Giulia Crispiani
Saturday, July 9, 2022 • Duration 48:01
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
Self-Portrait, in our webshop
Auto-Portrait, the French translation of the book
Deculturalize, an exhibition about Carla Lonzi
Divided Publishing, their website
Credits
Edited and mixed by Sven DehensIntro and outro by Chloe ChignellRecording by bothMusic sample from "I'm Following You" by Félicia Atkinson
Cinderella's Diaries, with Sina Seifee & Bryana Fritz
Saturday, February 12, 2022 • Duration 23:47
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)."
Philosophy For Spiders, with Mckenzie Wark and Tessel Veneboer
Saturday, September 18, 2021 • Duration 53:55
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.
Neighbor / Treatment - with Rachel Levitsky and Adrian Bridget
Sunday, May 23, 2021 • Duration 28:48
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.
This Container 08 | Chloe Chignell, Stefan Govaart | Launch
Saturday, May 15, 2021 • Duration 49:46
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.
Vava Dudu with Geo Wyeth, Alberto García del Castillo, and Marnie Slater
Saturday, May 1, 2021 • Duration 54:30
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.
The Bat, Bad Mood and Autodomestication with Krõõt Juurak and Galerie
Thursday, April 22, 2021 • Duration 36:15
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* and Galerie International.
Galerie International (https://galerie.international)
rile* books (https://rile.space)
