Expanded Reading Workshop focused on Clarice Lispector’s “The Stream of Life”.
Lugar a dudas. Space for Contemporary Art. Eight weeks duration. Cali, Colombia.
Workshop description:
There is a book written by Clarice Lispector—a writer beyond classification—that is neither a story, a novel, a diary, nor a theoretical work. If I had to say what it resembles, I would say it resembles a torrent of vitality and language, which may explain its title: Água Viva, translated into English as The Stream of Life. In this book, the writer speaks with a voice that becomes spellbinding, prayerful, secretive, and raw. Let’s read it together. But let’s read it in a radical, inventive, unrestricted, capricious, and generative way.
Água Viva is perhaps a way of writing that is also a way of existing. It contemplates and conceives a variety of issues: death, identity, writing, sensuality, eternity, thought, turtles, dinosaurs, music, time, the now. But in the end, always and above all: language.
The goal of this study group is to invite us to become readers as free as the writing of Água Viva. Let’s be readers who invent, who play, who associate, who escape, who take what they read to unexpected extremes, who “get off topic,” who create vanishing points—whose way of reading is also a way of creating.
If we read this book in a radical, expansive way, where might it take us? What kinds of images, objects, songs, body movements, poems, and actions might we generate—or might be generated within us—when we read it? What is it, or what can it mean, to read this text radically? What does it mean to read it in an expansive and generative way?
Our methodology will be rooted in the shared reading of the book. From there, we will explore and create in ways that arise from the participants. We will follow the thread—or threads—of what emerges within us and discover together what this approach to reading can generate.
We may explore:
- operations with the text itself
- gestures and writings inspired by fragments
- actions-gestures in space
- experiences with matter
- actions-gestures with the body
- actions-gestures with the voice, voices and more.
