war of words
Translation Workshop for the Mono-Lingual
Saturday, December 29, 2-4 pm
Cost: $10
Free wine for $2/glass donation
Texts and paper will be provided; please bring a pen.
The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable since, of all readers, the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know only one language? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge. [continue reading…]
War of Words Reading
Saturday, December 15, 7-9pm
$5 admission
A Celtic curse. A duel of poetries. Language as virus. Language as a tool for ingeniously tormenting. The unsettling impact of Algonkian place-names in settler descriptions. Words of children as a vector for lethal disease spread among their parents:
These and other word-struggles will be read aloud, to amplify the “War of Words” segment of our Battle year. Please come and enjoy the language of Jane Collier, William S. Burroughs, Ben Marcus, Paul Metcalf and Kurban Said, not to mention that aggrieved anonymous cursing Celt.
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? with Keith Sanborn
Friday, November 30, 7pm
As part of the War of Words exhibition, Keith Sanborn will screen, present and contextualize the Situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) by René Viénet.
Viénet was part of the Situationist International and the film is a classic example of the Situationist strategy of Détournement. In this work, Viénet brilliantly appropriates a martial arts film and subverts its original meaning by dubbing in his own text dealing with class conflict and alienation.
Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, curator and translator who translated this work “in order to add to historical understanding and to release what remains of its revolutionary analysis and praxis—in short, its orgone energy.”
Sanborn will present the film and conduct a discussion and analysis following the screening.
A Taste of Class Warfare While Waiting for Election Results
Saturday, December 8, 7pm – CANCELLED
Free wine for a $2 donation
Join us for the first in our Battle film series, curated by Joseph Martin. The topic is relevant: class warfare using words for weapons. The Servant (1963), starring Dirk Bogarde, was written for the screen by Harold Pinter. It is the first of three films written by Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey and is arguably the jewel of the Losey/Pinter collaboration, a slow-burn of a movie about the complex — and eventually toxic — relationship between manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) and his upper-class employer Tony (James Fox). [continue reading…]
Translation workshop for the monolingual
TBA
Cost: $10
Texts and paper will be provided; bring a pen.
Free wine for $2 a glass.
The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable, since of all readers the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know one language only? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge. [continue reading…]
Play “Yes or No” With Us!
Revised Deadline: September 10, 2012
Please join us in creating a collaborative artwork as part of the War of Words exhibition opening September 15.
The Premise:
We are constantly drawing lines in the sand to delineate “us from them.” Zero or One. Black or White. Yes or No.
Yes or No explores this ubiquitous binary conflict by bringing together elements from a multitude of makers. While each piece is autonomous, the sum total reflects the hive mind at work.
How to Play
1) First make the big decision. Choose either “Yes” or “No.” Really, only one of these two words…think carefully! [continue reading…]
