#47 Reading Group: Goddess Change

In the coming four months Buro Stedelijk hosts the speculative fiction reading group Goddess Change, initiated by artists Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz. The year 2024 is the date that marks the beginning of the story in Octavia E. Butler’s masterpiece Parable of The Sower, where young protagonist Lauren Olamina comes of age in the dystopian circumstances of a bleak future. The reading group will focus on this date, 2024, as the year in which the fictional book Parable of the Sower transitions from portraying the future into portraying the past. For this occasion Anna and Müge have invited artists, writers and scholars Adriana Knouf, Fiep van Bodegom, Marly Pierre-Louis and Nat Müller. Each of these experts will lead a different session, where we will be reading and discussing passages from Parable of the Sower and other feminist science fiction texts.

We will collectively look at the agency we find in speculative futures that are scrutinized through a feminist and queer lens. While reading different passages from various books, we will delve into possible translations between the visual arts and science fiction literature.

In this session we will concentrate on Butlers world-building in Parable of the Sower. What rules did she set for herself while writing the novel? What (literary) sources did she use to imagine a future? How are Butlers ideas of power – a central theme throughout her oeuvre – expressed through her depiction of gender, survival and society in this novel? Parable of the Sower starts in 2024, in a world were society has fully broken down and is ravaged by ecological disaster on a planetary scale. Lauren Olamina, the main character in Parable of the Sower, uses religion to organize a community, her own religion written down in verses in what she calls Earthseed: The Books of the Living. We will read chapter 16, when Lauren Olamina shows her verses for the firs time to the people around her and plants the seed for a  movement that will enable humanity to take root amongst the stars and will turn her, posthumously, into a prophet, or even, a god.

Fiep van Bodegom is writer, critic and translator. She is editor at Extra Extra Magazine and teaches at the Creative Writing department at Artez, University of the Arts. She published regularly about literature in, amongst others, De Gids, De Groene Amsterdammer, NRC and De Nederlandse Boekengids. For the first Dutch translation of Octavia E. Butlers novel Kindred (Verbonden, 2022) she wrote the foreword.

We invite you to join one or more of these events on 23 March, 20 April, 25 May and 22 June, from 15:30 – 17:30 in Buro Stedelijk’s Studio Space located inside Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

You will receive the text beforehand, but preparatory reading is optional. We will also read them on the spot. Traces and thoughts will be documented on the walls of the office, will be expanded and remain visible through the windows during the period of these gatherings.

The reading sessions at Buro Stedelijk lead up to a two-day feminist science fiction event Gathering Earthseed taking place at W139 on 20 & 21 July 2024.

Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz previously realized Manifestation #20: Taking Root Among The Stars with Buro Stedelijk at UNFAIR23.

The title derives from the first verse of Octavia E. Butler’s The Book of the Living.

Buro Stedelijk Studio Space, 15:30 – 17:30
This event will be in English.

Manifestation #47: Reading Group Goddess Change is part of a series of four Saturday afternoon hosted by Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz in Buro Stedelijk’s Studio Space.