BOOKSHELVES Program | “A Plural Singular: How to Live Together*”
“A Plural Singular: How to Live Together*” was a performative reading in which BOOKSHELVES resident Ana Iwataki composed a score for three voices consisting solely of quotations from the 3307 W Washington Blvd library and her titles-on-loan to the collection. Personifying solitude, union, and plurality, these collected voices fantasize “a sociability without alienation, a solitude without exile.” In the words of translator Kate Briggs, “…we are not reading cold print, but text warmed by direct transmission.”
*Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège De France (1976-1977). Edited by Claude Coste. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
The performance and text structure was conceptualized by Iwataki and 3307 director Amanda Martin Katz. Iwataki composed the content of the score from the following books:
Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews. New York. Penguin Books, 2001. Print.
Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège De France (1976-1977). Edited by Claude Coste. Translated by Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Print.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Print.
Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018. Print.
Carson, Anne. Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print. (3307 Permanent Collection)
Doty, Mark. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Print. (3307 Permanent Collection)
Fisher, M. F. K. The Art of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. The Bird’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.
Tannahill, Reay. Flesh and Blood: a History of the Cannibal Complex. Dorchester: Dorset, 1975. Print.
[bios here]
photos by Ash Thayer
video by Brian Sohn
Read Iwataki’s CURATORIAL STATEMENT
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View Iwataki’s READING ENVIRONMENT