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16.01.2023 Werker 16  'Buildings, Interiors, Parks'

The Rant

In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers. &ldquo;A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.&rdquo;&mdash;Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead &ldquo;What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?&rdquo; Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter&mdash;and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to S&oslash;ren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together. Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live? Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life &ldquo;Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating&mdash;and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.&rdquo;&mdash;The Washington Post &ldquo;Li&rsquo;s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.&rsquo;&rdquo;&mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.&rdquo;&mdash;The Boston Globe &ldquo;Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre.&rdquo;&mdash;Financial Times &ldquo;Every writer is a reader first, and&#160;Dear Friend&#160;is Li&rsquo;s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.&rdquo;&mdash;Entertainment Weekly &ldquo;Yiyun Li&rsquo;s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.&rdquo;&mdash;San Francisco Chronicle

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li, read by Jennifer Ikeda

On International Workers' Day, artist Katherine MacBride presents working on/working through/working with, a mix for indoor listening, in collaboration with Louise Shelley and The Voice of Domestic Workers, and Taraneh Fazeli.

This broadcast brings together fragments of the text ‘Labour of Love’ by curator Taraneh Fazeli, sound recordings made by curator Louise Shelley and support network and campaign organisation The Voice of Domestic Workers, and sonic materials from artist Katherine MacBride’s research into a mix that invokes connective listening.

This event concludes Katherine MacBride’s residency at HMK (Hotel Maria Kapel in Hoorn, The Netherlands), which was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. In place of an event at HMK, Katherine presents parts of her research through this listening session presented together with Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee.

Katherine MacBride’s presentation concludes the research chapter ‘Work’ within HMK’s 2020 programme ‘Slow Burn’. The programme examines care within the context of small institutions and asks how we can build practices and spaces of care within the limits of an exploitative system, with which we are all complicit.

Taraneh Fazeli is a curator and educator from New York. Based in an ethic of care emerging from disability justice that values interdependencies and dependencies, her traveling exhibition “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” brings together artists and community groups to counter the over-valorization of independence in American society and examine how racialized global capitalism has produced debility in many populations while, at the same time, creating bureaucratic infrastructures that support very few people.

Louise Shelley is a London-based curator whose practice has recently included “Structures that Cooperate” at Cubitt, London, a fifteen-month programme departing from Cubitt’s position as an artist-run cooperative. She was previously Curator of Collaborative Projects Curator at The Showroom, London, where she ran “Communal Knowledge”—a series of collaborative projects activating approaches to critical engagement with The Showroom’s neighbourhood.

The Voice of Domestic Workers is an education and support group run by and for migrant domestic workers, calling for justice and rights for Britain’s sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. They provide educational and community activities for domestic workers - including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and provide support for domestic workers who exit from abusive employers. Their work seeks to end discrimination and protect migrant domestic workers living in the UK by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training, healthcare and legal advice.

For further context, please have a look at the extensive broadcast notes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p1xTbm45GcPngibH25uS-_cM2ncYTK25/view?usp=sharing

working on/working through/working with

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working on/working through/working with

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