EMILIA-AMALIA
Session III: Autobiography/Narration
Monday, July 25, 6-9 pm
Dufferin Grove Park - Location confirmed. Please meet near the east fire pit.
"Literary texts were treated as we treated our own words, that is, as parts of an enigma to be investigated by taking them apart and putting them back together in different ways along with non-words: places, facts, feelings. The result of this total experimentalism was to wipe out boundaries between life and literature. Women novelists, their biographies, their fictional characters, and we ourselves exchanged roles, giving birth to new, strange novels" -- Milan Women's Bookstore Collective
Foregrounding the ways that autobiography and memoir function as vital spaces for shaping feminist subjectivities, this session of EMILIA-AMALIA invites participants to think about the various strategies authors use to give language to life experiences. This open-air session will centre on sharing examples of memoir and autobiography from participants' personal collections, and then practice using these tools to narrate our own life stories.
To participate in this workshop, please RSVP to Leila Timmins at leila@gallery44.org.
text: Hannah Black, "Press for Service," from Dark Pool Party (2016) -- to be read out loud
conversation: Excerpts from memoirs and autobiographies contributed by group members. (Please bring in a text of your choice.)
writing activity: "New, strange novels:" an experiment in self-narration and autobiography"
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EMILIA-AMALIA is an exploratory working group that employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist art, writing and research practices.
Through readings, screenings, discussions, and writing activities, the group will investigate historical and intergenerational feminisms, as well as relationships of mentorship, collaboration, and indebtedness between artists, writers, thinkers, curators, and practitioners. In tracing these lines, the group aims to elucidate the histories of feminism that have been obscured and overlooked in the narratives of 1970s, or “second-wave” feminism that we have inherited. EMILIA-AMALIA will critically examine how we fit in with those past iterations, and also, how we might update and extend them so that they can respond to contemporary questions.
Motivated by a desire to think through these questions collaboratively, each monthly meeting will be structured around a text, a conversation, and a writing activity.
EMILIA-AMALIA is an open group that invites all levels of engagement. We are all experts. No one is an expert. Expertise is not expected.
EMILIA-AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Leila Timmins, and cheyanne turions and is hosted by Gallery 44.
