Writing & Society Research Centre seminar series

Event Name
Writing & Society Research Centre seminar series
Date
9 April 2021
Time
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location
Online

Address (Room): RSVP to Suzanne Gapps, S.Gapps@westernsydney.edu.au for Zoom link

Description

Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks collaborate together as the critical art collective, Snack Syndicate. A book of essays by Snack Syndicate is forthcoming with Discipline in 2021 and the exhibition Supply Chain will be installed at Bus Projects in Melbourne. Together, they founded Rosa Press, a communist publishing collective that makes pamphlets, books, and miscellanea. They also publish poetry individually, with Labour and Other Poems by Astrid Lorange published by Cordite Books in 2020 and Inferno by Andrew Brooks coming this year with Rosa Press. Across their poetry projects, issues of labour, work, and value are explored with an emphasis on the effects of alienated forms of labour that capital depends on, as well as the promise of forms of resistance/care that might survive (and destroy) the capital relation. While the title poem in Labour focuses on (social) reproduction as the history of birth, death, and care, Inferno reimagines Dante’s circles of hell as the almost inescapable circuitry of contemporary bureaucracy. Read together, their work can be conceptualised through ‘study’, here imagined as a way of reading, writing, talking, and loving together and against the exhaustion of work. In this panel, they will read from their two books, as well as reflect on their critical and creative practices and their shared commitment to study. chaired by Kate Fagan, Director WSRC ASTRID LORANGE is a writer, editor, and artist. She studied writing and cultural studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where she completed her doctoral thesis on Gertrude Stein and contemporary poetics. How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein was published by Wesleyan University Press in December 2014. Her research interests include experimental writing, poetry and poetics, contemporary aesthetics, cultural studies, critical race studies, infrastructure, gender and sexuality studies, transnational feminisms, practice-led scholarship, and critical pedagogy. Her current project, a collaboration with Dr Andrew Brooks, interrogates the way that infrastructures of discipline and control – such as laws, fines, contracts, paperwork, prisons, and predictive systems – contribute to the naturalisation of settler colonialism. The project draws on a diverse range of examples found in media, art, and literature to show how such logics of settler-colonialism can be revealed, critiqued, and resisted. She is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, and the author of several chapbooks of poetry, including Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2020). With Andrew Brooks, she is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. ANDREW BROOKS is a writer, artist and Lecturer in Digital Media Cultures in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW. His research proposes strategies for reading and listening to contemporary media events, systems, and infrastructures. His current research is organised around three main projects: the politics of noise and listening; infrastructural inequalities; and the politics of race and embodiment in media culture. His research interests include: media studies, cultural theory, critical race studies, decolonial theory infrastructure, sound and listening, labour, gender and sexuality, visual culture, poetry and poetics. Together with Astrid Lorange, he is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, and half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. His work has been exhibited and published both locally and nationally, and he is also a member of the publishing collective Rosa Press. His book Inferno is forthcoming in 2021 and he is the former Deputy Editor of the Sydney Review of Books.

Speakers: Astrid Lorange (UNSW) & Andrew Brooks (UNSW)

Web page: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/writing_and_society/events/writing_and_society_seminars

Contact
Name: Suzanne Gapps

S.gapps@westernsydney.edu.au

Phone: 02 9685 9377

School / Department: Writing & Society Research Centre