This Text is Already zu spät / Sewing Riverword (performative reading with a poem and a sound work) within the scope of The New Present Tense / Experimental Lit and Performance Festival A) GLIMPSE) OF) at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC) in Athens.
Curator: Dimitra Ioannou. Guest curator: Yiannis Andronikidis.
The performative reading entitled This Text is Already zu spät / Sewing Riverword consists of rhythms, flows and their disruptions. It explores inquiries about violence, memory, noise and the sounds of words. It is organised as a polyphonic entanglement both of live and recorded voices and sounds. The liberating violence and tenderness of practices such as distortion, distraction, dispersion, and refraction are put to the test.

Every day I read a fragment from the Lesbian Body. Before beginning her narrative, Monique Wittig writes, it is our fiction that validates us, the desire to do violence by writing to the language.  What exactly does she mean? To do violence to what? Literally, she says, to do violence by writing to the language (on the language or in the language?)
I note this alongside what Paul Preciado says: It is precisely because the violence of the sexual and colonial regime is too serious that it is necessary to unfold the unconscious and deconstructing forces of poetry against it.

by writing to the language sounds like
a secret symphony our language
waiting to be absorbed our saliva mass
craving to be transformed
kin to the sun

The rhythm consists of pauses; the body consists of continuations and interruptions. Can the flow of the text use its pauses?
The performative reading, entitled This Text is Already zu spät / Sewing Riverwords, consists of rhythms, flows, and their disruptions. It is organized as a polyphonic entanglement of live and recorded voices and sounds.
It explores the possibilities of detuning (grammatical) tenses and their resonances, examining the material texture of words and the body of their meanings. The liberating violence and tenderness of practices such as distortion, distraction, dispersion, and refraction are put to the test.

About the the New Present Tense / Experimental Lit and Performance Festival:
On November 22nd and 23rd, A) GLIMPSE) OF) opens to the New Present Tense, and its radical modes of signification.
The present tense is used to talk about the present and the future. It is a base form of understanding, awareness and information. In times of total violence, irreversible catastrophes, pervasive sadism (Mary Turfah), political abuse, false consciousness (Marx), and hegemonic cynicism, the present tense may work as “a way of self-distributing” (Dimitra Ioannou). Since it reflects how one engages in the here and now, what one shares with the other human and non human animals, how one consumes time on this planet and perceives the future, it may be transformed into a tool of refusal, “collective intelligence” (Verónica Gago), or/and a “new order of feeling” (Anne Boyer). The New Present Tense as a political gesture may create new vernaculars and new communities. Curator: Dimitra Ioannou. Guest curator: Yiannis Andronikidis.
Dates: Friday, November 22nd + Saturday, November 23rd, 2024
Hours: 19:00 doors open | 19:30 start | 22:00 end
Location: Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC)
Languages: Greek, English. More information: https://aglimpseof.org/festival
With the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
Images 1&2 by Sophie Seita & Dora Vasilakou
Images 3-12: Excerpts from the text This Text is Already zu spät / Sewing Riverword