AWARE and Union Quoi? International·e, an artist collective associated with the documentation center at Villa Vassilieff, are pleased to invite you to four original reading workshops during the 2023-2024 academic year.

Union Quoi? International·e conceived this residency as follows:

“We’d like to revisit the writings of the authors we love in a different way, weaving them together before their memory is lost. The mesh of interlacing threads would be ways of circulating their words and thoughts beyond the margins that frame the fabric of their language; of disseminating them through our pores, of decentering their point of gravity, beyond the warp and weft of their impression.

By asking ourselves how we understand our presence, here and now, and how, over time, we navigate the texts of these authors, what memory we forge of them, beginning to trace other constellations and to see the words drawn by our sensibility to the trembling pages we hold. The uncertainty of the future towards which we are moving drives us to reinvention: as inheritors of books, how do we read? How are we sensitive to the words left by our elders? To their thoughts? How can we move forward with them? How can we feel differently? How do we write? How do we “understand together”?”

• December 12, 2023 – When books turn to dust, we will weave roads and unweave borders (based on texts by Sofia Karampali Farhat & Aja Monet), conceived and led by Kenza Belkadi

• February 14, 2024 – When books turn to dust, we will keep whispering love words (based on texts by Qiu Miaojin & other authors), conceived and led by Yeongseo Jee
Free registration here.

• April 17, 2024 – When books turn to dust, we will still be gatherers and storytellers (based on texts by Ursula K. Le Guin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, bell hooks, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Leslie Marmon Silko), conceived and led by Camille Simon Baudry

• June 19, 2024 – When books turn to dust, we will shape them into containers (based on texts by Audre Lorde, Donna J. Haraway and other authors), conceived and led by Yu-wen Wang

These sessions will explore the thought and sensibility of key female authors through a variety of reading methods (games, shifts, folds, echoes, dialogues, love letters, conversations…), in order to envisage the act of reading together, no longer as a rational assimilation of a set of words and passages, but as a more fluid, organic activity, akin to weaving, germination, a welcome inside oneself, healing, an act of creation.

To participate in these workshops, registration is required, but no prior reading or preparation is necessary. Most texts will be read in French, with a few exceptions in English during the first and last workshops, and bilingual versions in the other sessions.

“The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness. ”
(Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other, Indiana University Press, p.2)