We’re super excited to be able to share the recording of an evening of readings by poet and activist-scholar Nat Raha and novelist Sulaiman Addonia. It took place at our space in Brussels on 7th of December 2024.

Nat raha read excerpts from her most recent book apparitions (nines) and Sulaiman Addonia invited simon asencio to read an excerpt from his novel The Seers. the evening concluded with a conversation between the authors.

About apparitions (nines)

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of  “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

About Nat Raha

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, amongst others. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

About The Seers

Suliaiman addonia’s The Seers follows the first weeks of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are.

About Sulaiman Addonia

Sulaiman Addonia is a British-Eritrean-Ethiopian author based in Belgium. His novels, The Consequences of Love (2008) and Silence is My Mother Tongue (2019), have been translated into more than twenty languages. Silence is My Mother Tongue was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards, the Firecracker (CLMP) Awards, and the African Literary Award from the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. He currently lives in Brussels, where he has launched a Creative Writing Academy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, as well as the Asmara-Addis Literary Festival (In Exile). In 2021, he was awarded Belgium’s Golden Afro-Art Prize for Literature, and in 2022, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Enjoy!

For this episode we are excited to share with you the recording of the launch of How to Leave the World, by Marouane Bakhti, which was translated from French by Lara Vergnaud and published by Divided Publishing in 2024. The launch took place at our space in Brussels on the 30th of November last year.

About How to Leave the World

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

“A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.” Annie Ernaux

About Marouane Bakhti

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Marouane’s reading is followed by a conversation with Oscar Mathieu.

Oscar is a cultural worker based in Brussels. He performs, writes, draws, translates, tattoos, researches. His focal points of interest include self-organization, faggotry, and dogs.

For this episode we’re delighted to share with you a recording of Asiya Wadud reading from her latest collection of poetry, Mandible Wishbone Solvent alongside a manuscript-in-progress, titled: Any Want Rings The Circle.

The reading took place at rile*books on the 12 of October 2024.

Mandible Wishbone solvent was published by the university of Chicago press earlier this year. The poems and prose in the collection engage with migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art— though not necessarily in tha t order. Punctuated by images of Asiya’s own original art, offers an indirect meditation on the concepts of the drift and the isthmus ("An isthmus— passageway, a threshold, a deliverance.

Asiya Wadud is a poet based in brooklyn and the author of 5 collections of poetry: Mandible Wishbone Solvent from this year, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body 2021, A filament in gold leaf and Syncope both from 2019 and Crosslight for a young bird from 2018. She has also been published Interlude Docs, POETRY, e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

After the reading we opened the floor to questions from the audience. For technical reasons the audio quality of the questions is not ideal but we wanted to anyway include the conversation in the podcast so we hope you can excuse the slight glichtes in the audio towards the end.

We hope you enjoy listening!

Today we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung that took place on September 28th of this year. Eugene reads from his most recent publication Bitterness and Wit, published by the Asymmetry Art Foundation, London, within the framework of Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung's curatorial fellowship at Whitechapel Gallery in 2023. The reading is followed by a conversation with Chloe Chignell.

The titiular story in the collection, Bitnerness an Wit follows a museum worker who feels a profound sense of suffering as he vulgarises language to write jargon-filled wall texts for a contemporary art institution he finds deeply unserious and unrigorous. Amongst other things, he questions the emancipatory valence given to language in certain schools of psychoanalysis, and poses questions to do with whether giving language and form to a series of symptoms can alleviate an experience of suffering tied to something so material, and inescapable, like the wage. The reading is followed by a conversation I had with Eugene in which we discuss his approach to writing fiction and art critisim and his thinking on practices of institutional critique.

Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, cultural worker, and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. He is particularly interested in anarchist and dissident publication practices, utopian thresholds in language, and literary expressions of the revolutionary consciousness. In 2023, Eugene was the Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he curated the exhibition Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess.

Eugene has been a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, and was previously part of the curatorial and public program teams at the Julia Stoschek Foundation and documenta fifteen, respectively. His writing has appeared in places such as e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, Art+Australia, and more. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC).

Eugene currently teaches critical theory and curatorial practice at Design Academy Eindhoven. Previously, he has given lectures at RMIT’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, UCL Slade School of Fine Art, and Fudan University. Eugene holds degrees in art history, gender studies, and law from the University of Sydney.

This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via the website rile.space.

For this eposide we’re delighted to share with you a reading by LA Warman and Clara Pacotte that took place in December 2023. This will be our first bilingual episode featuring excerpts of Whore foods in it’s original English interspered with Clara Pacotte’s French translation which was published by RAG editions in 2022.

LA Warman is a poet, sound artist, and teacher currently based in New York City. Her most recent poetic novella titled Dust was published in 2022 by Inpatient Press. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. where teaches courses on topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Warman is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers and Poets at University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement.

Clara Pacotte is a writer, videoist and researcher. In her work, she develops potential social alternatives by mixing documentary and fiction, middle age and time extrapolation. She thinks about her films and texts as archives of a better future. Pacotte co-founded the group EAAPES in 2017 with Charlotte Houette to investigate feminist and queer issues in science-fiction literature and experimental feminist translation.

This episode is edited by Ros Del Olmo. Check our events via the website www.rile.space or visit us in Brussels.

Welcome to the rile* book podcast, an archival space for the readings and conversations we host at our space in Brussels. For this episode we have the pleasure of sharing the recording of a reading by US based poet Farid Matuk reading from his forthcoming collection Moon Mirrored Indivisible. It was followed by a conversation with Brussel based writer Filip Jakab. The event took place on June 15th 2024.

The poems explore the aesthetic perversions of syntax and rhyme to search for yet unrealized perversions and purities amidst national, sexual, and ancestral orthodoxies.

Enjoy !

This episode was recorded and edited by Ros Del Olmo. You can check out past and upcoming events via our website www.rile.space

About Farid Matuk
A queer writer of Syrian and Peruvian heritage, Farid Matuk has lived in the U.S. since the age of six first as an undocumented person, then a “legal” resident, and now as a “naturalized" citizen. He is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse, and of several chapbooks including My Daughter La Chola (Ahsahta). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry, in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, and the Library of America’s Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, among others. Matuk's poems can be found in journals including The Nation, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry, Bomb Magazine, Lana Turner Journal, and The Paris Review. Matuk's book arts project, Redolent, made in collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, was awarded the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize by the Poetry Society of America. His work has been supported by The Headlands Center for the Arts, by a Holloway Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley, and by a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship. Matuk’s translations of Peruvian poet Tilsa Otta are forthcoming from Graywolf Press and his third collection, Moon Mirrored Indivisible, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2025.

About Filip Jakab
Filip Jakab writes and edits columns, fiction, essays, and celebrity profiles. He is a contributing editor at L.A.-based FLAUNT magazine. He read WHO WANTS IT HOW, his three-month gossip~culture~sex column installment at Spare Wheel, Brussels. IRL column readings are published via SaltOverGold, his Substack claiming: “…imbued with the depth of bleakness, half-journalistic, half-fictional, the column appears as a possibility to reflect on what people in Brussels gossip, but barely anyone has the guts to say it out loud.” He previously read his fiction at CELADOR, Brussels and David Horvitz Garden, Los Angeles. His forthcoming fiction will appear in October 2024 at SPZ gallery, Prague. He is currently writing the draft of his first novel and develops ideas by typing in notes on his phone during morning runs. He was born in Košice, Slovakia, and is based in Brussels, Belgium. 

For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are excited to release the recording of Ariana's reading at rile*, which took place on October 28 2023. Ariana Reines read from her yet unpublished poetry collection The Rose and from her latest book A Sand Book. The reading was accompanied by a conversation with performing artist and writer Stefa Govaart, and a closing q&a with the audience.

Find more information about the book here.

About Ariana Reines
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Ariana’s books include 'A Sand Book', winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & long-listed for the National Book Award, 'The Cow', winner of the Alberta Prize, 'Coeur De Lion', 'Mercury', and 'The Origin Of The World'. In 2012 she created 'Ancient Evenings', an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, as well as 'Lazy Eye Haver,' an astrology practice through which she pioneered new forms of arts and consciousness pedagogy. In March 2020, she created Invisible College, a hub for poetry, art, & sacred study online. Recent performance & teaching projects include 'Divine Justice' (2022), a 25-hour durational performance inspired by Medea at Performance Space New York, and 'Gnostic Poetics', a unique seminar/workshop on the Nag Hammadi library held at Scripps College in 2022. Reines has taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Pittsburgh, among others. She lives in Queens, New York.

About Stefa Govaart
Stefa Govaart works across dance, performance and text. They have worked with and for choreographers and visual artists across Europe, co-organize the artists' gathering Spring Meeting at Performing Arts Forum (St. Erme, FR), and are a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. With Marija Cetinić, they are working on an ongoing epistolary project. They teach at P.A.R.T.S., and live in Brussels. 

Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Flaxen" by Dean Blunt

For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are thrilled to release the recording of Alice Notley's reading at rile*, which took place on September 13 2023. Alice Notley read from her recent publication, her six book epic The Speak Angel Series, published by Fonograf Editions in 2023. Marija Cetinić joined in conversation with Alice Notley, opening questions around the genre of the epic, feminism and disobiedence; followed by a closing q&a with the audience.

Further Reading and Links
You can find more information about Alice Notley's books here on our website.

About the book
The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

About Alice Notley
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver.  She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles TimesBook Award, the Griffin Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, and the  Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award.  Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include Eurynome’s Sandals, Certain Magical Acts,Benediction, and For the Ride. Notley is also a collagist, cover artist, and maker of hybrid art objects. An art book, Runes and Chords, is forthcoming or has already appeared.

About Marija Cetinić
Marija Cetinić is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is coordinator of the MA Comparative Literature program and founding member of the research group Sex Negativity. At Sandberg Instituut, she works as thesis supervisor and writing instructor in the MA Critical Studies program. Since 2022, she is part of the programming collective at Perdu, center for poetry and experiment. With Stefa Govaart, she is involved in an ongoing epistolary project.

Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Borders" by Carmen Villain and Jenny Hval

For this episode of rile* , books podcast we are joined by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Giulia Crispiani to talk about the first English translation of Carla Lonzi’s book Self-Portrait which was translated by Allison herself, with editorial assistance from Giulia. The book was published by Divided Publishing in 2021.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue is an American poet, writer and translator currently based in Bologna. She teaches creative writing, translation, and literature at John Cabot University in Rome and Middlebury College Florence and Rome. She is the author of BODY MINERAL (2016) and the co-author of On Endings (2019). Her writing and translations have appeared in The brooklyn Rail, Words without Borders, Flash Art, BOMB and NERO.

Giulia Crispiani is an italian artist and writer living in Rome, where she works as an editor of Nero Editions. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and holds an MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work has been presented at Center for Book Arts, Centrale Fies and FramerFramed among others. She is the author of: What if Every Farewell Would Be Followed by a Love Letter (Union Editions 2020),  and What if I can’t say goodbye (Union Editions 2021).

Further Reading and Links

Self-Portrait, in our webshop

Auto-Portrait, the French translation of the book

Deculturalize, an exhibition about Carla Lonzi

Divided Publishing, their website

Credits

Edited and mixed by Sven Dehens
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by both
Music sample from "I'm Following You" by Félicia Atkinson

Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series, featuring Cinderella's Diaries, a project by Brussels based artist and researcher Sina Seifee, with readings by Bryana Fritz. Over the last few years Sina has been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. More recently Sina started to work with the figure of Cinderella, thinking with her about the human-animal modes of imagination.

From this Sina started to develop a series of texts called Cinderella's Diaries. In this podcast Sina will introduce us to this research and writing practice. Born in Iran, Sina looks at the changes the Farsi dubbed version brought to Cinderella's character. Further Sina looks at Cinderella's position, living in an impossible house, locked in an attic surrounded by animals as her companions. The second half of the episode features readings from the first two diaries, read by dancer, performance-maker and text-worker Bryana Fritz.

Edited by Sven Dehens.

[ Transcript ]

Introduction by Sina Seifee:

"Hello, welcome rile* books podcast, my name is Sina Seifee, I am artist and researcher based in Brussels. Over the last few years I have been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. I have been working with the figure of Cinderella for some time, thinking with her about the human animal modes of imagination.

"Cinderella is part of my imaginary and my heritage, especially the Walt Disney version of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was dubbed masterfully before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voice in Farsi, which was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in Tehrani cabaret voice-performances, has a completely different tonality than its English original. Her articulation sounds much more adult and sexy while the mice speak more “childish.” From a different archetype of a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, she is now part of the older regimes of moral narratives, almost abject with no pedagogical significance unless she is totally refashioned. Disney didn’t change the story so much but made the choice to make the animals the real protagonist of the story. It is hard to imagine that anyone would want to raise their children (regardless of gender) to be like Cinderella, weak.

"From whom should we inherit our practices and how? I prefer Cinderella to be my ancestor. Cinderella is not liberated, but she is also not not-free. She lives in an impossible house with an impossibly terrible family. Why doesn't she become a psycho? Why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she exercises a radical form of freedom that allows her to know more about the animals she lives with. Our imagination, as the audience of the story, depends on her animals. Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? Amateur, meaning the one who develops an expertise in taste. And ethologist, meaning a practical mode of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted).

"In writing Cinderella’s diaries I was interested in getting to know more about how the story changes when the investigator becomes a biographer. And try to think in the rhythms of daily living in Cinderella’s mansion, including the receiving of insult upon insult, pleasure of mending spiderwebs, cutting cat bullshit, feeding illegal mice, and routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals. I was also thinking about contemporary European performative arts, where I am situated. A context in which art is understood, on a fundamental level, as the capacity to resonate otherwise through the body. In other words, art is practiced and evaluated as a source of provocation. I can’t stop thinking that Cinderella’s waiting is not of the same nature of the intensification of the body (in all its differences) that I witness in Europe. If she is not resonating to feel a different world, what is she resonating with?

"Cinderella’s diaries also helped me to invite two issues about the state of precarity that I don’t know yet how to think about. Her problematic relation to precarity reveals two difficulties: the question of hierarchy and the question of waiting. In the story, the most adventurous and the most curious of the animals are surprisingly the ones who are most attached to Cinderella. This is precisely what Cinderella herself performs, learning from her animals, that bravery is not a form of detachment from the environment, it is rather a form of hierarchy. The other issue is about waiting. Cinderella is not a trickster (outwitting her situation by using clever technologies), but a waiter. Under an existential X-ray surveillance her acts reveal what I monitor and recognize as compositional waiting. She waits compositionally while working with full optimism within the precarity of her situation that she has no hope for getting better.

"A Cinderella who does her job engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of the authority of her evil mother. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present. And therefore inviting more interesting questions about her mode of labour. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals, the affirmative register of life as something overwhelming, the involvement of senses in the force of things evil or indifferent, the ability to interpret the weight of a milieu that spreads across cattle with dairy animals and castles with sophisticated princes.

"Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted)."