AWARE and Union Quoi? International·e, an artists collective associated with the Villa Vassilieff’s research centre and library, are pleased to invite you to a new session of the book club.

Practical information

Wednesday, June 19, 2024, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Free registration here.

For this final session, conceived and led by Yu-Wen Wang, you are invited to fold and unfold poems, texts, images and sounds from women authors and artists who share what their bodies carry through the displacements punctuating their lives. This recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s text, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, read during the previous session, in which she describes a bag as a vessel for stories, and a home as a vessel for people.

In the pages carrying words from the chosen extracts, we welcome the haze, smell, noise and humidity of these stories that recall our own experiences:

Gently bring your hands together, letting them form a cradle.

Allow the words to fade between your fingers, read the lines traced on your palms.

We will begin this session by listening to excerpts from Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton’s album Music and Poetry of the Kesh followed by a collective reading of excepts from her book La Vallée de l’éternel retour [Always Coming Home] that recounts the history of the Kesh people evoked in album’s audio pieces. Though these are imaginary nations, the sounds that come through our ears and into our bodies conjure up places in our memories, at the same time elusive yet precise, turning us into vessels.

With this in mind, the reading of poems by Yin Ling will allow us to share our emotions. This author attempts to remember and return to Vietnam through her writing, while living in Taiwan because of the war. Poems by Ling Yu will also be read, describing her train journey between Taipei and her hometown, Yilan. Last but not least, we will be discovering excerpts from the monographs of Jane Jin Kaisen and Nguyen Trinh Thi, which document their research into memory, war and migration, transmission and history.

Readings will be held in English and French. Audio tracks prepared for this session will be played and mixed according to participants’ feedback, in order to constitute a collective reading, made up of excerpts from the following works:

• Community of Parting
Jane Jin Kaisen, Archive Books, 2020

• Le temps de guerre
Yin Ling, Circé, translated by Benoît Sudreau in 2022, [1977]

• Lettres de Panduranga
Nguyen Trinh Thi, Jeu de Paume and CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 2015

• History Has Failed Us, but No Matter
Hyunjin Kim, Mousse Publishing, 2019

• La Vallée de l’éternel retour [Always Coming Home]
Ursula K. Le Guin, Mnemos Eds, translated by Isabelle Reinharez, 2019

• Terres sauvages
Ling Yu, Circé, translated by Camille Loivier and Emmanuelle Péchenart in 2022 [2014]

• Music and Poetry of the Kesh
Ursula K. Le Guin, Todd Barton, 2018