thankyouforcoming

Open Public Reading Group with Dominik Czechowski, art curator, ACROSS #39.

Informations
Saturday 13 May, 2PM
Nice (Libération, in front of the library)
(we have a place to stay if it rains...)
Free entrance

The residence
ACROSS #39

Huge thanks to Katarzyna Kula at Espace Museal Gombrowicz in Vence for her help with obtaining multiple translations of the text, as well as the team at the Witold Gombrowicz Museum Wsola, Poland for their support.

Pictures below : Credit Frédéric Pasquini for thankyouforcoming

We invite you to a live multilingual reading in one of the Nice’s busiest public spaces. We will read out loud, collectively, a carefully selected text by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), each in our own language.

A migrant first exiled in Argentina then Germany, Gombrowicz lived and worked in Vence for the last 5 years of his life. Throughout his practice, he engaged readers in polemical discussions about literature, philosophy and politics, and openly constructed his identity as a writer through an anti-nationalist discourse and his personal experience of displacement.

His writing, apart from the original Polish, exists in a number of translations that include English, French, Arabic, German, and Italian languages. By coming together and reading out in different tongues, voices and registers, we will aim to create a feeling of connection – an embodied shared experience, however brief and impermanent.

Taking the writer’s nomadic body (of work) as the starting point and enacting it through distinct languages and accents of the performers, we will try to achieve a sense of belonging to a city, marking its space with an alternative collective body.

What new meanings and forms of solidarity can be found in such a public gathering?

What kinds of resistance can be formed between various languages, countries, mis-translations and linguistic, intellectual and emotional slippages?

One piece of Gombrowicz’s writing in multiple translations will be used for the performance – the same text for everyone.
Printed copies will be available on the day for those willing to join the reading.
English, Czech, French, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Spanish...