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Odarodle Symposium: WOMEN, MEN, & OTHERS

16. September 2017 12:00

12:00-13:30 – Art/Activism, Discussion Round and Reflection Circle with Dusty Whistles and friends.

15:00 – Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, The Five Ages, Floral Arrangement Performance

16:00 – Curator’s Tour of the Exhibition

18:00 – Along the translated traces of Monique Wittig and the Berliner Amazonen Frauenverlag. Lecture by Nanna Heidenreich

Monique Wittig, the French theorist, writer, and feminist, wished to exorcize meaning from language, in order to allow for something else. For example: “a lesbian is not a woman.” In 2003, with only 67 years s/he died from a heart attack in Tuscon, Arizona, where she had been living, writing, and teaching for many years. At 29 she received the renowned Médicis Prize for Literature for her work Opoponax; numerous “novels” followed, escaping any and all attempts to categorize them, as well as theoretical texts, some of which were compiled in The Straight Mind (1992). Her 1973 book Le Corps Lesbien was translated into German and published in 1977 by the Berlin-based Amazonen Frauenverlag with the title Aus deinen zehntausend Augen Sappho (From your ten-thousand eyes, Sappho). To read and re-read Wittig, in French, in English, in German, in translation, is a challenging task, its history of reception is bumpy. This talk attempts to follow an undisciplined path of branching traces, where along numerous positions the “Amazons” get involved.

20:00 – Naomi Rincón Gallardo, The Formaldehyde Trip, Screening and Performative Reading

Naomi Rincón Gallardo’s The Formaldehyde Trip transforms recent history into mythic journey. This live cinema concert imagines the Oaxaca-based, Mixtec activist Alberta “Bety” Cariño — who was killed in a paramilitary ambush in April 2010 — in her passage through the underworld. Planted rather than buried, the traveling Cariño encounters warriors, witches, and the Mesoamerican god/goddess of death as she becomes the seed for a new feminist life. The Formaldehyde Trip also unfolds as the dream of an axolotl, a salamander-like native to Mexico City that, in its home environment, resists metamorphosis and does not grow from an aquatic to a land-dweller. Filmed in the canals of Xochimilco (Mexico City), Oaxaca, Berlin, Vienna, and at Galería de la Raza (San Francisco), the axolotl, like Cariño herself, eludes Western classifications as it calls to indigenous knowledge, possibilities, and locales. The road to Utopia winds through revolt.