Saturday, 4 June 2022, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Reading (German) and conversation (English) with
Gérsande Spelsberg | Maxi Wallenhorst | McKenzie Wark
Music by
6zm
Please register via email to august@augustverlag.de.
On a trip to Australia in the summer of 1995, the author Kathy Acker meets McKenzie Wark. Wark’s book Virtual Geography, which explores life with global media, has just been published. The two spend intense days and nights together, followed by a two-week high-frequency e-mail exchange after Acker’s return to the United States. Electronic messages cross several times a day. Everything becomes a means of transpacific courtship: art and philosophy, sex and politics, rumors and confessions. Insights and silliness alternate until there is an intimate closeness, but also painful misunderstanding. I’m very into you is the document of a seduction on the threshold of the new millennium, in which sexuality and gender, identity and ways of relating are radically addressed. „When I’m obliged to reread the text, I approach it as a kind of spontaneously produced, accidental autofiction. Intimate and awkward“, McKenzie Wark writes in her afterword to the German edition of the e-mails, which was published this spring in a translation by Johanna Davids. „I read myself now through the turn my story took: my coming out many years later as a transsexual woman. I feel like Kathy and I both struggled in different ways with the genders we were assigned. Sometimes I read these emails as between two people who might be trans and don’t yet know what to do about it. There’s pathos in that—and comedy.“ Actress Gérsande Spelsberg will read a selection of the translated emails. McKenzie Wark and Maxi Wallenhorst will then talk, based on the book, about the paths that what is discussed in the emails has taken since then. The conversation will be in English.
Event in cooperation with August Verlag on the occasion of the German translation of Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, I’m very into you. Correspondence 1995–1996.
Pandemic: As the event is in attendance, the number of people in the room is limited in accordance with applicable Covid-19 precautions. Visitors are asked to register in advance via email to august@augustverlag.de. Moreover, visitors will need either a negative daytime test result, proof of full vaccination, or proof of recovery from Covid-19.
