13 June 2024
18:00-20:00
SOLU Space, Panimokatu 1 (3rd floor), Helsinki

In the third iteration of the Reading Matters, researcher, writer and artist Anastasia (A) Alevtin (Khodyreva)invites you to read and think-feel with Natasha Myers, Alison Faafer, Sara J. Grossman, Jessica J. Lee, Katy Davis, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, Rowan Lear and Christian Keeve.

The knot of the excerpts from several scholarly texts, incantations, poetry, images and scripts frames their emerging artistic research project tentatively titled Dormancy, Reseeding, Resistance. Supported by The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, the project brings together the expertise and personal experience of transdisciplinary artists, microbiologists, chronically sick bodies and community gardeners who collectively work with seeds, plants, and a concept of dormancy. The knowledges are pulled together and mobilised in light of the inflamed contexts of anti-ableist politics and food insecurity, especially as lived by economically precarious, migrant and disabled people.

In general public perception, dormancy might appear to be a passive process, but a gardener, an artist, a microbiologist or a chronically sick body knows that dormancy is a complex kind of individual and communal activity, as an agentic enactment, as a political project of subversion. Conceptualised this way, dormancy needs careful tending. In collaboration with Light-Harvesting Complex (Vantaa) and Glasgow Seed Library, Dormancy, Reseeding, Resistance emerges as a quiet attempt to learn to put seeds to sleep and work out rituals of awakening and cross-pollination. It strives to learn from seeds (but also bacteria and microbes) how to tend to our (collective) bodies and argue for dormancy as a subversive gesture.

Anastasia (A) Alevtin (Khodyreva) is a researcher, writer & artist whose work scrutinises how dominant Western politics of structural marginalisation are lived and quietly subverted in one’s daily anti-ableist, migratised, and non-binary communities and multispecies kinships. Crip theory, corpo-affectivity of chronic illness in migratised lives and ancestral herbal knowledge are the themes they are thinking about at present. In their artistic practice, they work with text, textile, performance, aesthetic gestures, and collective readings. They are curious to create critical atmospheres of sensing and being, poetics and politics of touch, airy ecologies of multispecies relationships and other intimacies. They whole-heartedly believe in independent publishing.

To receive a copy of the text in advance, please contact yvonne.billimore@bioartsociety.fi by 11th June. The text will also be collectively read aloud at the start of the reading circle. An audio reading of the texts is available here