PODCAST #3 — ANNA BARHAM — TO BE WE TO BE — CONVERSATION WITH HELEN PALMER

JULY 28, 2020

Quote—Unquote’s podcast series provides a broadcast space for sound works, spoken word practice, readings, teachings and aural miscellanea by artists, anthropologists and researchers.

Helen Palmer is Anna Barham’s guest in a podcast interview which explores the complex yet playful layers of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem Patriarchal Poetry. Their conversation forays into the humour and play of nonsense, the materiality of the text, resemblances and virtuosity, content words versus function words, language and power. 

Using the same poem, Anna Barham has devised a series of encounters via Zoom — TO BE WE TO BE, where the materiality and performativity of the text is explored through various strategies of reading with the participants.

BIO

ANNA BARHAM‘s work explores translation, authorship and subjectivity as distributed and forms of agency. Recent projects have been hosted at Site Gallery, Sheffield and MIMA, Middlesborough, UK; Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven, BE; Wellcome Collection, London and MAAS, Sydney; K-W, Berlin; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. 

HELEN PALMER is a writer, theorist and performer, and works as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense and her new book Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange has just been published by Edinburgh University Press.