[For your invite, please pre-order a copy of the book here]
Come join the kabarett to launch So Mayer’s A Nazi Word for A Nazi Thing. Queer culture – beautiful, unstoppable, in your face – on your screen, in multiple and magical forms, including award-winning short films, delicious readings & livewire performance, with So as your MC. Bring your hats, snacks, cocktails/mocktails, candles and sparklers, and let’s set the world alight.
Film from: Ker Wallwork and Juliet Jacques // Campbell X // Timothy Smith
Readings from: Ray Filar // Keith Jarrett // Isabel Waidner
FILMS:
APPROACH/WITHDRAW (Ker Wallwork and Juliet Jacques, 2016)
Written and directed with artist Ker Wallwork, Approach/Withdraw explores how public understandings of oestrogen and sex hormones affect the sense of self and relationships of those who feel at odds with their assigned gender. Commissioned by the BFI and King’s College London as part of their Queering Love, Queering Hormones programme, in collaboration with no.w.here. Narrated by Rebecca Root.
DES!RE (Campbell X, 2017)
A meditation on the desire for people who have been assigned female at birth but now define as non-binary, gender nonconforming, transmen, transgender, lesbian, bisexual, queer. We hear the voices of women and other non-binary, gender nonconforming, transmen, transgender who are attracted to them. Moving and vulnerable testimonies of loving what is made marginal by dominant mainstream culture and media.
Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/220515108
QUEERING DI TEKNOLOJIK (Timothy Smith, 2019)
Spoken by the collective digital voice of a group of queer artists and activists, this collaborative project speculates about the possibilities of a temporality yet to come. What does the future look, sound and feel like? Did we manage to dismantle the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and avert the impending environmental catastrophe? Which strategies of protest and resistance were the most effective? This is a message of hope.
Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/351256360
BIOS:
Ray Filar is a writer, artist, and PhD student in Gender Studies and Creative Writing at Sussex University. Their research in Gender Studies theorises important contemporary challenges for the UK sex worker movement. As part of their Creative Writing practice, they are developing a collection of prose-poetic essays about sex, work, criminalisation, queer bodies, and not liking the things you’re supposed to. @rayfilar
Juliet Jacques is the author of three books: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007), Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015), and a volume of short stories entitled Variations, due from Influx Press in June 2021. She has published both her journalism and creative writing widely, and is the founder and co-host of Suite (212) on Resonance 104.4fm, which is funded by Patreon subscriptions. @zinovievletter
Keith Jarrett is the author of the poetry collection Selah (Burning Eye Books, 2017), the play Safest Spot in Town (2017), which was on BBC4, as well as the poetry pamphlet I Speak Home (Eyewear, 2015). Jarrett is a former UK Poetry Slam Champion and his poetry show, Identity Mix-Up (2013), received 5 stars at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Jarret is currently writing a novel and pursuing a PhD at Birkbeck. @keithjlondon
So Mayer is the author of jacked a kaddish (Litmus, 2018), Tender Questions (with Preti Taneja, Peninsula, 2018), Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015). Their essays appear in On Relationships (3 of Cups, 2020), At the Pond (Daunt Books, 2019), Not That Bad, ed. Roxane Gay (Allen & Unwin, 2018) and Spells, ed. Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás (Ignota, 2018). @Such_Mayer
Timothy Smith is the creator of narrative short films such as Attack (2005) and Le Weekend (2007), shown at more than 70 international film festivals; and experimental non-narrative films such as A Queering of Memory: Parts 1&2 (2017), Queer Babel (2018) and Queering di Teknolojik (2019), which have screened at the BFI London Film Festival and internationally. Timothy is a member of UAL’s CRISAP.
Isabel Waidner’s books include We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019), Gaudy Bauble (2017) and Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (ed., 2018), published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. They are the co-founder of the event series Queers Read This at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (with artist Richard Porter), and an academic at University of Roehampton, London. @isabelwaidner
Campbell X makes award-winning films that centre gender non-conforming, transgender, and Queer People of Color, including his East London-set feature film Stud Life (2012) and short Visible (with Kayza Rose, 2019). He recently contributed one of the letters to the Royal Court’s My White Best Friend, and is a co-founder of the Wahala Fund, offering completion funds for QTIPOC short films @CampbellX
Please join us for the digital launch of Radical Attention by Julia Bell, at 7pm on Thursday 12th November.
Julia will be in conversation with writer and critic Olivia Laing, and will take questions from the audience.
To register your interest, simply pre-order a copy of the book here and we will send you the link!
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An essay on the battle for our attention in the age of distraction.
Attention pays. In today‘s online economy it has become a commodity to be bought and sold. Bombarding us with free smartphone apps and news websites, developers and advertisers have turned what and how focus our attention into the world‘s fastest growing industry.
In exchange for our attention, information and entertainment is ever at our fingertips. But at what cost? In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell asks what has been lost in this trade off. How can we reclaim our attention? In a world of infinite distraction, how can attention become radical?
‘Terrifying, clarifying and ultimately hopeful, this is an essential book. Julia Bell grapples with the grim realities of our online lives, setting out possibilities for resisting and reclaiming our imperilled freedoms.’ — Olivia Laing
‘Julia Bell is one of the outstanding essayists of our time; a Joan Didion for the digital era, her Radical Attention is both thoroughly alarming and fiercely inspiring: what is being done to us and what we can do about it are lucidly and entirely convincingly laid out here. Every home in which has wifi needs and deserves a copy.’ — Horatio Clare