Part Two
Reading: Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters

Following the screening of Part One: On floating and eating at e-flux Screening Room, join us that same evening in the library at the Screening Room for a reading by Evan Calder Williams, Anahita Jamali Rad and Steff Hui Ci Ling at 9pm. 

The two screenings in Tulapop Saenjaroen: A (Digressive) Focus Program draw their titles from two of the letters in Evan Calder Williams’s Roman Letters (2012). The second part of our program features a reading from this book, as well as from new work by Williams. Steff Hui Ci Ling will also read from her recently published collection of anti-work poems, Mixed Martial Arts (2022) and Anahita Jamali Rad will read from still (2020), a poetry collection that “propose[s] an alternative to action, a way to be the wrench in the cogs of the machine, a way to jam the signal by refusing receptivity.”

“In Roman Letters, Evan Calder Williams writes letters to his comrades while on what seems like a residency or research fellowship. He describes, with some comical contempt, his judgment towards tourists, the sheepish struggle of trying to find respite from respite, and wanting to be more righteously doing nothing and being present. It is a collection of epistolary confessions that is skeptical while romantic, mundane while ornate, without ceasing to underscore a politics and desire for the end of capitalism from the center of a work-non-work conundrum. 

It was during a Banff residency, on a hike I didn’t want to be on (and felt like I had to be on), that I was introduced to Roman Letters. I’m almost certain that I would not have found out about Willliams’ book outside of the context of this residency, or I would have regrettably found it a lot later than I did.” 

—Steff Hui Ci Ling

​For more information contact program@e-flux.com.