Part Two / Reading: Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters

Part Two
Reading: Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters

Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters (2012). Book, 148 pages.

Tulapop Saenjaroen

A (Digressive) Focus Program

Part Two
Reading: Evan Calder Williams, Roman Letters

With Anahita Jamali Rad and Steff Hui Ci Ling

Free admission

Date
July 1, 2022, 9pm
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

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.

Category
Labor & Work
Subject
Poetry
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Tulapop Saenjaroen: A (Digressive) Focus Program

Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies for Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming with Sternberg Press in 2024, Inhuman Resources. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism and is a Contributing Editor to e-flux journal, as well as a former member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine.

Anahita Jamali Rad was born in Iran and currently based on the traditional territory of the Anishnaabeg people of the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa). Informed by anti-imperialist materialist theory, Jamali Rad’s work explores silence, absence, and stillness amid ideology, violence, class, collectivity, desire, place, and displacement. They have published two full-length books of poetry, still (Talonbooks 2021) and for love and autonomy (Talonbooks 2016). Jamali Rad is a co-founder of House House Press with David Bradford. Their most recent project concerns the history of binaries in relation to mysticism, nationalism, orientalism, and the technologies that bind them together.

Steff Hui Ci Ling is a cultural worker, labor researcher, and occasional critic and film programmer living as a guest on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. She is currently organizing the circulation of an Art Workers’ Inquiry for Decolonial Potential. The Inquiry is concerned with the political tradition of workers’ inquiries and its application in the cultural sector and our labor’s relationship to settler-colonial property.

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