Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. (Jean Genet in The Thief’s Journal, 1949)
Slow Reading Club begins with an attack on the assumption that there is a single, correct and upright posture from which reading is “performed”. It means to re-conceive the erect spine and move towards other means of understanding, positioning, and spatialising the erection of the reader. Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. The group deals in constructed situations for collective reading. SRC looks at, probes, and interrupts ‘readership’ as a way to stimulate the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader. For Bâtard Festival, SRC will lead the public through a number of late night choreographic reading situations. SRC does not aim at deconstruction or even comprehension of the texts, but at the production of a kind of excess: to temporarily suspend criticality for intimacy and to negotiate agencies with the text.
