On Thursday 21 of June 6 pm Six chairs books and guest-host curator and video artist Gerda Paliušytė will run its seventh twice monthly Open Reading Group – Clap when you want to! – which is an invitation to read ahead, collectively discuss and support dear bodies of women, of the earthly and the technological, and seek the joy of learning the planetary together. With this weeks readings we will talk about how the stories about the experience of people of color change then they are told by people of color, as well as what’s common between Twin Peaks and hip-hop, and why the year of 2016 could be named ‘the year of Afro-pessimism’.
In the media, the year of 2016 is often named as the renaissance of black culture on television. An African-American Donald Glover, the author of the popular and critically acclaimed television series-surreal comedy “Atlanta” (2016 to present), said in one interview that his aim in developing the TV show was ‘to show white people, you don’t know everything about Black culture.‘ In a conversation with the New York magazine, Glover remembers the initial suggestion by FX channel to accommodate a drug dealer character in a ‘trap-like apartment’. According to him, ‘We (Black writing staff of the series) were like, ‘No, he’s a drug dealer, he makes enough money to live in a regular apartment ’. Following Glover, while developing ‘Atlanta‘, some of the things were so subtle and Black that only the creative team of the series could understand them.
READINGS AND MATERIALS: Donald Glover Cannot Save You (Donald Glover’s profile by Tad Friend in ‘New Yorker’ (March 5, 2018); Frank B. Wilderson ‘Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism’ (Duke University Press Books, 2010); Ta Nehishi Paul Coates ‘Between the world and me’ (Spiegel ansd Grau, 2015).
Materials will be in English. Conversations might swing between Lithuanian/ English depending on participants’ mood and preferences.
TO SIGN-UP AND RECEIVE MATERIALS, please write to info@sixchairsbooks.lt; space is very very limited, but, if necessary we can move around the KAH building.
The session will take place at the bookstore (Six chairs books/ Kauno Menininkų Namai / V. Putvinskio 56, Kaunas) from 6 to 8 pm. It is free and fresh beverages are provided.
CLAP IF YOU WANT TO!
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Inspired by the saying ‘If you can’t read a body, you’ll never finish a book’ from ‘The Great Outdoors’ (graphic novel by Monika Janulevičiūtė and Monika Kalinauskaitė), we believe that learning sensitivity of reading bodies could lead us to reading more or, rather, finding substantially new ways of reading books. This ORG concerns itself both with the critical feminist practices and its legacies, the cosmical and the comical, & material interdependence and suffering from ills of another species, engaging with hybrid thinkers working along the lines of cultural theory, biology, feminist sciences and technology.
