1525 No Reading Reading Club: 'Whose History?' by Lis Rhodes

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Free
Open to all 15-25 year olds
Wheelchair Accessible

"Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head."
- Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose History?’, 1978


No Reading Reading Club is a free series for young people, in which a selected text is read aloud and discussed. Texts will be handed out in the session. No pre-reading or research is required. The absence of knowledge is embraced to experiment with friendly and collective ways to interpret a reading.

'Whose History?' is an influential essay written by Lis Rhodes in 1978. It was written in response to what she argued as the marginalisation of women artists in the history of experimental film presented at the Film as Film exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1979. It has often been accounted for as the catalyst for the formation of Circles, a women only distribution collective for artists, brought together by a shared desire to both advocate, and examine, past figures marginalised in male dominated histories of cinema.

Together, we will explore the concept of 'history' and how it is defined by whom?


*No Reading Reading Club is inspired by No Reading After the Internet, an ongoing project of cheyanne turions:
"Though the idea of a reading group isn’t new (consider Rainer Ganahl’s Reading Karl Marx and Kristina Lee Podesva’s D&G Reading Group Or How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Colours?), No Reading nonetheless poses itself as a space for experimental learning and discussion. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a space within which to retrace the steps used in constructing understanding, productively challenging individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. To participate in No Reading is to invoke an exuberant not-knowing, seeking out moments of collective illumination. The strategies we have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous exhibitions and happenings."
https://noreadingaftertheinternet.wordpress.com/

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