NEWS: Bridge Announces “A Festival of Holes”

NEWS

Bridge Announces “A Festival of Holes,” Oct. 13-Nov 3

Today, Bridge announces “A Festival of Holes.” A four-part festival homage to holes on the occasion of the release of South African writer Stacy Hardy’s “An Archaeology of Holes” with Bridge Books. The festival will host events at the Art in Odd Places Festival in New York city, the inaugural Bridge Film & Video Festival at SITE/less Chicago and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago.

"Pink Hurm," Michael Workman, 2021. Graphite, Charcoal, Sakura and Black Magic inks on archival journal paper.

FRI-SUN, OCT 13-15, 2023 “Yes/On 14th Street” @ 14th (& intersections listed below) New York city (as part of this year’s Art in Odd Places 2023, DRESS: Uniform, Armor, Identity. Express, Provoke, Conform. Friday October 13, the festival will take place on the east side between Avenue A and 3rd Avenue. On Saturday, October 14, the festival will move between University and 7th Avenues. On Sunday October 15, the festival will shift to the west side between 7th and 11th Avenues (or to the water). Please refer to the AiOP website for updated details.

Kristin Mariani’s Yes/On 14th Street is a processional performance of dress prototypes, which she calls Text Toiles, for AiOP2023:DRESS. Worn by Chicago-based performers, Erica Mott and Darling Shear, themes of intimacy, care, language and boundaries will be addressed through the production, presentation, and dissemination of a series of care labels. Written in collaboration with Michael Workman, past and present-day literary histories surrounding 14th Street will enfold within these care labels questions of how identities are formed in relation to dress, and a specific, embodied sense of place. 

THU, OCT 27, 2023 @ SITE/LESS (presented as part of the Bridge Film & Video Festival)

7-9PM EVENING PROGRAM: “ENTRANCES, INTERIORS & LOST PLACES"

7pm READINGS ARCHIVE: Literary & Poetry Film Screenings Presented in Partnership with “A Festival of Holes” A screening curated by Lesego Rampolokeng as an opening lineup for the inaugural Bridge Film & Video Festival.

"Hurm Snout," Michael Workman, 2022. Graphite, Oil Pastels, Sakura and Black Magic inks on archival journal paper.

FRI, NOV. 3, 2023 FESTIVAL OF HOLES @ NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY, 5701 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 (Two events):

5PM PRELUDE / AFTERNOON PROGRAM: MOVEMENT MATTERS PRESENTS “MIRRORGLASS: LAND ACTS (TRACES)," A NEW DANCE & PERFORMANCE ART EXPERIMENT by Amanda Saucedo, Michael Workman, Mat Rappaport & Range Mobile Lab

Originally conceived as a showcase for dialogue between the Bridge artistic collective and dance practitioners selected for collaboration, Mirrorglass is a temporary ensemble formed when needed to develop new movement works mapping the intersections of dance, performance art, and civic participation. Increasingly material for artists, in the last fifteen years dance and performance art, coupled with the background of critical museology in the 1960’s/70’s, has emerged as a force for wholesale transformation of contemporary conceptions of the museum from that of mere object repository to one of an ever-expanding experiential space for mapping out a present separate from, but contiguous with our own lived experience of it.

By opening these practices up to temporary ensemble engagement, we seek to blur the distinctions between dance and performance art, and to provide space for Conceptual movement-making that takes place both within and informed by traditional disciplinary boundaries, but that also goes beyond each as distinctly recognizable forms. We believe this will result in a focus for both artists and audience on movement itself as a core concern and as artistic material that defines the boundaries of each.

"Hurm Watches," Michael Workman, 2022. Sakura and Black Magic inks on archival journal paper.

7PM AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF HOLES RELEASE PARTY & BOOK LAUNCH

A RELEASE PARTY & launch of the fiction anthology, An Archaeology of Holes, published by Bridge Books, Chicago, South African writer Stacy Hardy is joined by an unruly ensemble of archaeologist to excavate and celebrate the hole as a gathering point; that into which everything falls: black holes, boreholes, manholes, potholes, airholes, sinkholes, stink holes, wormholes, tone holes, keyhole, cunt holes, a-holes, mouth holes, hideyholes, holy holes, wholly holes, breath holes, holes in the head and in the body and in the earth, holes in humanity, holes as escape routes and connection points … a gap, a gape, a gasp, agape …

Participants include anthropologist anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Chicago), poets Daniel Borzutzky (Chicago) and Lesego Rampolokeng (Soshanguve), composers and musicians Adam Zanolini (Chicago) and Neo Muyanga (Soweto), writers Meghan Lamb (Chicago) Robert Kloss (Chicago) & more.

Stacy Hardy is a 2023–24 Visiting Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, a collaborative research center at the University of Chicago. She is a member of the international research team on the Neubauer Collegium's Transperformations project, which is studying the “collective breathing” of colonized peoples and the potential for such breathing to be liberatory.

An Archaeology of Holes, by Stacy Hardy. Cover image by Michael Workman, Image courtesy Bridge Books.

An Archaeology of Holes by Stacy Hardy
An Archaeology of Holes is an excavation and an evisceration of love, loneliness, alienation and what it means to be human. Working between fabulism, dark realism and autofiction, these stories propose the creative and liberatory possibilities of holes, which are everywhere: in bodies, in the ransacked earth, in erased lives and memories, in forgotten loves and lovers and the endless massacres.

“I welcome the way Stacy Hardy’s fiction gives me the shivers, disturbs my understanding of myself and the world around me. Her stories guide me, sometimes lodestar, other times mischievous will-o-wisps, always revelatory. Through lenses both forensic and fantastic, Hardy holds up to her strange light the human body and the body politic. For fans of writers like Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Rikki Ducornet, Kathryn Davis, or Carmen Maria Machado, for fans of crossing the veil to slip off their skin and dancing around in their bones, of picking through their own trash, of rediscovering themselves after despair, heartbreak, and loneliness, Archaeology of Holes is a most perfect companion.”

— Danielle Pafunda, Author of Along the Road Everyone Must Travel, Winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize

“Audacious and masterful, every story collected in Stacy Hardy’s An Archaeology of Holes delivers a new and unexpected euphoria. Each story promises intellectual enticement and emotional entanglement, brutal and ugly and real: Stacy Hardy is prophetess and I will follow her anywhere.”

— Lily Hoang, Author of Changing, Winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“These wild, weird, amazing stories create life, create the best and most vibrant art, out of the many ways that death is absorbed into our worlds, our minds, our bodies. From bullet holes to black holes, from mouth holes to safe holes to buildings with holes in their centers, Stacy Hardy’s writing blasts its way from absence into vital and unforgettable presence. When the extreme violence of misogyny and racialized capitalism becomes a normal part of our life and landscape, it is art and great writing that helps us see both our damage and our potential escape routes. Archaeology of Holes is a collection that will stay with me for a very long time.”

— Daniel Borzutzky, Author of The Performance of Becoming Human, Winner of the National Book Award