Please note: this session will take place in Trinity Square Video - Suite 121 401 Richmond St. W
The last writing intensive session (Alien Language, Nov. 2016) focused on autobiography and self-narration as feminist strategies for art making and writing. In this deep winter writing intensive, we’ll consider the flip side of that coin. Using a series of text, film and visual prompts, participants will attempt to shed the skin of their own experience and ask questions from inside another body, or from outside the body altogether. In Alien Language, we thought about the political potential of writing one’s own story in a language that has only and always been designed by others. But is there any potential in attempting to write from outside the self?
There is no pre-reading required for this session. All writing will be spontaneous and formulated in response to various text, film and image prompts. EMILIA-AMALIA will provide the prompts, but we would love to include prompts from participants as well. Just send us an email (leila@gallery44.org) with your idea or bring it in to the session. This session is part of of a five-session arc exploring "how to ask a question".
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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.
