#79 Reading Group: Goddess Change

We gather at a singular moment in time. The year 2024, the date Octavia E. Butler chose to begin her Parable of the Sower, has passed. What was once speculative fiction, a projection into an imagined future, has crossed into the realm of the past. We now read Butler’s masterpiece from the other side of its temporal horizon, looking back at 2024 as both the dystopian landscape she imagined and the year we actually lived through. This shift transforms our relationship to the text: the future Butler warned us about is no longer ahead of us but behind us, asking us to reckon with what we witnessed, what we survived, and what we carried forward.

Since the inception of Buro Stedelijk, our collaboration with Anna Hoetjes and Müge Yılmaz has taken many forms: exhibition, film screening, countless conversations, and this ongoing series of reading groups. These gatherings have created space for collective thinking, where Butler’s vision has served as both compass and question. Throughout the reading groups, we’ve held 2024 as a focal point. The year when young protagonist Lauren Olamina comes of age amid collapsing systems and fierce determination to survive and build anew.

For this final reading group, Anna and Müge have invited Marly Pierre-Louis, whose practice centers the survival strategies of Black women and femmes. Pierre-Louis approaches the Parable series as an oracle, one that speaks to self-belief, collectivity, and the profound possibilities that emerge when we refuse to accept predetermined futures. Her lens offers us a way to revisit not just Butler’s text, but all the texts we’ve encountered together over these months.

Rather than approaching this gathering as a conventional reading group with a new text to dissect, this time we’re creating something different: a living archive, assembled in real time through the practice of zine-making. Participants will select, edit, and curate passages from the texts we’ve explored, transforming static printed material into active documents. This process mirrors the ethos of Butler’s protagonist Lauren Olamina, whose Earthseed verses were never meant to be fixed doctrine but rather seeds for continuous growth and adaptation.

The zine we create together will include prompts and empty pages, invitations for future notes, toolkits crystallized from our collective reading, space for the ongoing work of sense-making. We will also include a short fragment from Parable of the Talents, extending Butler’s vision beyond the threshold we’ve just crossed. This is an archive that refuses completion, acknowledging that the work of imagining otherwise never ends.

As we gather on November 1, we mark not an ending but a transformation. The reading group becomes something else, carrying forward the questions and practices we’ve developed together into whatever comes next. Change, after all, is the only lasting truth.

Join us as we transform what we’ve learned into tools for what comes next.

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

Manifestation #79: 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.