[Launch] Making Kin II: Plants

Join us for the launch of Making Kin II: Plants for an evening exploring xenofiction and its potential to grasp the world from the perspective of a non-human other. Catalina Imizcoz, director of Cthulhu Books, and contributors Bianca Baldi and Anastasia Eggers will present their work with a conversation about the Making Kin series, followed by beautiful authors’ readings. 

At a time when our understanding of plant life and the vegetal world is being consistently and dramatically reshaped, this book extends an invitation to inhabit the world of these all-but-static beings that surround us. Following the slightly defamiliarizing paths that plants and their rooted beings open for our mobile bodies, ‘Making Kin II: Plants’ becomes a space in which to exercise empathy with this other form of life.

Schedule

19:30 readings and presentation

About the publication

Xenofiction proposes an exercise of placing our imagination—and with it our body—inside another's perspective. When we practice becoming with another's experience, we practice empathy. Even though every time we try to speak through a non-human voice we have to accept the impossibility of truly inhabiting another being's vital experience, we can find ways through creative practice to expand the way we sympathize and empathize. This anthology convenes twelve short stories and a visual essay by writers and non-writers that have experimented with plan embodiment.

With texts by: Alice Ahad, Bianca Baldi, Fatma Belkis, Alix Breda, Kai Edwards, Anastasia Eggers, Katie Goss + Rebecca Reynolds, Moselle K, Evie Muir, Yuri Pascacio Montijo, Christian Salablanca Diaz, Javier Velázquez Cabrero and Josfina Vidal Miranda.

Find the publication here: https://rile.space/books/making-kin-ii-plants

About the guests

Bianca Baldi is an artist working around the role of narrative as a means of knowledge production, in both fictional and historical contexts. Her films, installations, photographs and publications speak to the personal and subjective telling of history, but also reveal complex webs of political, economic and cultural influences. She has participated in exhibitions such as Shanghai and Berlin biennials, and been shown in Kunsthalle Bern, Extra City Kunsthal Antwerp and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, among other institutions. 

Anastasia Eggers has a research-driven practice and is currently working on seasonality in a post-seasonal world—where the growing, harvesting and consuming of food is no longer dependent on natural factors. She explores vulnerable ecologies alongside urgent social, cultural, and political conditions, using food as a medium to broach ideas of identity, origin and geopolitics. She works in the field of visual art as well as critical and social design, is an alumna of the Jan van Eyck Academie and has shown her work at The Green Corridor, Rijksmuseum Twenthe and the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, among others. 

Catalina Imizcoz is a researcher and editor based in London. She is the founder and editor of Pina magazine and director of Cthulhu Books.