special
Counterprojects and the Book of Days with Erin Honeycutt
Wednesday 20.11 20:00
For the fourth session of our monthly series on poetry and sound, curated and co-hosted by Pia Chakraverti-Wuerthwein, we are excited to invite Erin Honeycutt to explore the echoes across time and space that link Carla Grandi’s book of poetry “Contraproyecto” (1985/1987) and Meredith Monk’s film and album “Book of Days” (1988) to each other and the present. It will be a rare chance for English speakers to be introduced to Grandi’s work, which has yet to be translated from Spanish.
Conceived at roughly the same time and yet under very different circumstances, both works interweave medieval storytelling and contemporary events to protest racial and political violence and to celebrate intellectual and physical survival.
Carla Grandi wrote “Contraproyecto” as a personal and affective response to the everyday life and heinous violence of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, also barring her and many other leftists from teaching and publishing.
Written and produced in the late 1980s, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and affected by the uncertainties and injustices of the Cold War, Meredith Monk’s film “Book of Days” shifts between a fictional medieval town and contemporary footage from New York City. With a soundtrack composed by the avant-garde artist and composer, and voiced by herself and a twelve-voice ensemble, the film deserves to be listened to as much as to be seen.
At the present time of increasing authoritarianism, misogyny, and lethal polarization, we revisit these works in this session as means of mourning and political defiance.
Erin Honeycutt is a writer and bookseller based in Berlin. Their writing revolves around ekphrasis, the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device. Erin began CUTT PRESS in 2020, publishing artist books, zines, and reprints rooted in bootlegging practices with the archives of Hopscotch Reading Room, a bookshop in Berlin with a focus on queer and anti-colonial literature. Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein is a curator and writer based in Berlin. She previously worked at Esther Schipper as an Artist Liaison, and before that was a freelance curator on projects with Fondazione Prada, Slavs and Tatars, and SAVVY Contemporary, among others.