[Reading] An evening with Ma Bibliothèque

We're delighted to invite to you for an evening of readings and presentations of three recent titles by Ma Bibliothèque: Textual Actants by Adam Walker, Night School by Erin Honeycutt, The Hole by Katharina Ludwig. Join us in company with the authors and editor Sharon Kivland for an evening of multiplicities, things holding things together, a jouissant textual body, and a 'Media Archaeology of Dreams’.

Find the books by Ma Bibliothèque here on our website: https://rile.space/publishers/ma-bibliotheque

Schedule

18:30 Doors
19:00 Readings

Location: rile*books, Rue des Commerçants 62, 1000 Brussels

About the books

Textual Actants

Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the onscreen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.

Adam Walker is an artist and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text lies at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written; other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published, and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate, and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.

Night School

Night School is the synthesis of dreamwork and bookwork, combining collaboration with dream-vision report, creative writing, and AI—a ‘Media Archaeology of Dreams’. Its central character is the author’s voice in this process through ekphrasis. What/where is the separation between the ekphrastic object, the dream, and its description? Layers of the narrative mind, the textual mind, and their translation onto the page, form a collage of mediums: thresholds of the body, actual media, and the voices of others. The reader witnesses themselves reading, in the epistemological shedding of the ‘I’ and the tossing and turning of personhood through first and third, a threshold and a veil. It is a portal of unlearning, a becoming ever arriving.

Erin Honeycutt is a writer, currently living and working in Berlin where they run the publishing project, CUTT PRESS, for pamphlets, poetry, and artist books. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Dear Enheduanna (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025).

The Hole

The Hole is an epistolary work written in multiple forms, approaching the unsayable in a jouissant textual body, considering broken narratives and minor literatures through an investigation of (textual) holes, wounds (trauma), and the mouth (voice/language). Poetry operates as strategy of resistance and revolt, against systemic power structures and against closure. Wounds must stay open to speak.

Katharina Ludwig is a writer, poet, theorist, artist, and editor based in Berlin and London. Their research and writing addresses queer feminist practices of resistance and revolt. Their writing has been published by 3:AM Magazine, Zeno Press, Tripwire Journal, Strings Magazine, antiphony journal, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, and Nightboat Books. Their poetry chapbook The Girl Without, or Arma Mater has recently been published with Baulk Press. They are co-editor of VORTEXT, a mail-order poetry magazine.

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE is a not-for-profit project by the artist and writer Sharon Kivland. In her role as The Editor, she invites authors she considers to be good readers, whom she would like to house in her library or to become her library, inhabited. She agrees with Nabokov that a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader, is a re-reader. She knows her writers, and they know her, even when they have not yet met. They have read each other, or believe themselves to have done so. They are flirtatious, ruffling pages. She promises to do her best. The best is reading.

‘Je veux un travail élégant et érudit, avec un aspect modeste et pourtant agréable à contempler. Je veux un contenu léger et néanmoins sérieux’.