Collaboratively curated, the Friday night series brings writers, artists, critics, performers, and audiences together in an uncontainable assembly. We host readers from here and elsewhere to invite resonances across practices, open and press urgent dialogues, and build a space for shared struggles. We’re holding out for writing which has the potential to make things otherwise.
Caitlin Berrigan & Marianne Shaneen
Caitlin Berrigan
Caitlin Berrigan works across performance, video, sculpture, text, and choreographies to engage with the intimate and embodied dimensions of power, politics, and capitalism. Her artist’s book Imaginary Explosions (Broken Dimanche Press, 2018) was the subject of solo exhibitions this year in Berlin and Schloss Solitude, and her book Unfinished State is forthcoming from Archive Books with support from the Graham Foundation. Her current body of work, Imaginary Explosions, is a cosmology of pseudo-science fiction videos that follows an affiliation of transfeminist geologists as they operate in communication with the desires of the mineral earth for radical, planetary transformation. The next exhibition of this work will open in October at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. She has created commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Carpenter Center, and the deCordova Museum. Her work has shown at Storefront for Art & Architecture, Hammer Museum, Anthology Film Archives, LACMA, Goldsmith’s London, Homeworks Beirut, among others. She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT and a B.A. from Hampshire College. She is a PhD candidate at the Vienna Academy of Art, and a research affiliate of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Technology, Culture and Society.
Marianne Shaneen
Marianne Shaneen is a Lebanese/Mexican-American writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, who also works in documentary video. Shaneen received her MFA in writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and at Yaddo, and received a NYSCA Individual Artist grant for her documentary video essay—a poetic, playful, provocative exploration of fluid identity and trans-species possibility. Her work has appeared in Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Manchester University Press, Vanitas, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs. She is currently finishing her first novel, Homing—a speculative fiction work that experiments with what she calls “writing in the first non-human-person,” from the ‘perspective’ of various animals, plants, a stone, plastic. Amidst eco-destruction and military and corporate control of technologies and bodies, its female protagonist asks, Where does self end and other begin? As she realizes that everywhere home might be is becoming uninhabitable, personal trauma becomes increasingly entwined with ecological trauma. She lives in Brooklyn and in upstate New York, with her partner and their dog Rupert Pupkin.
