Let Me Make Myself Clear

rile* invites Rachel Levitsky and Nathalie Rozanes for an evening of readings and presentations.

Nathalie Rozanes & Rachel Levitsky - Let me make myself clear 16:9

To mark the 20th anniversary of Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist publishing collective based in New York, Rachel Levitsky will give a presentation on Anarcho-feminist institutional history through an essay she is currently writing on the history of Belladonna* Collaborative.

Nathalie Rozanes will read excerpts from her performances March (forthcoming).

Rachel Levitsky will read from her forthcoming book Dog Walk (Split Level Press) containing work from both Existing Condition and Against Travel.

Belladonna*

Belladonna* Collaborative is a feminist avant-garde collective, founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky. Belladonna* started as a reading and salon series at Bluestocking’s Women’s Bookstore on New York City’s Lower East Side. In June 2000, in collaboration with Boog Literature, Belladonna* began to publish commemorative 'chaplets' (defined as short chapbooks of immediate writing or work-in-progress) of the readers’ work. This series continues today and has reached well beyond #200.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the Belladonna* mission to promote the work of women* and feminist writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna* is committed to publishing and building literary community among women-identified and LGBTQIA+ authors who write off-center, producing work that is political and critical; situational rather than plot-driven; inter-subjective, performative, or witnessing rather than personally revelatory; work that reaches across the boundaries and binaries of literary genre and artistic fields, and that questions the gender binary.

rile*

rile* is a bookshop and project space for publication and performance. rile* is into poetry, theory, choreography, artist writing and various other text based experiments. rile* organizes performances, meetings, launches, readings and workshops.

Rile is the base word for silence in Láadan, a feminist constructed language developed by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982. Láadan was designed specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited forexpressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her science fiction Native Tongue series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centered language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this".

Past events

Let Me Make Myself Clear (WoWmen!)

5.03.2020 20:00 - 21:00