#60 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. 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.

For this session, Ilga Minjon has selected texts from Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood, 1987-89 and from Daisy Lafarge, Lovebug, 2023.

As a vantage point of the session, we will investigate topics of health, intimacy and microbiology in science(fiction) and literature. As we observe the harmful and scientifically outdated military rethoric of the body’s immune system that protects itself against ‘invasions’ from the ‘outside’ is evermore normalised, Butler and Lafarge gingerly dismantle the assumed binaries between illness and health; outsider and insider; host and hosted.

In her epic trilogy of Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, Octavia Butler shaped a deeply detailed entangled world in which an extraterrestrial species have an inane desire to heal and merge with others, sharply contrasted with humans’ hierarchical nature and beliefs. Through what Walidah Imarisha has called visionary fiction, Butler prompts existential questions about relationality and the politics of living together.

In the overt surfacing of fascism in Dutch and western societies, commonly used metaphors of parasites to describe and dehumanise people that are projected to be a ‘non-self’ are regaining popularity. Not only does this metaphorical binary weaponise people’s fear and legitimise racist violence, in Lovebug Lafarge traces how science, biology, archeology and other fields increasingly demonstrate how the binary between self and other is most persistently, an imagined one.

Buro Stedelijk Studio Space, 14:30 – 17:30
This event will be in English.

Manifestation #60: Reading Group Goddess Change is part of a series of Saturday afternoons hosted by Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz in Buro Stedelijk’s Studio Space.