Freeman’s N°3:
home

SAVVY Contemporary and silent green are delighted to welcome back John Freeman for the third “strikingly international” (Boston Globe) issue of his magazine Freeman’s. Focussing on the question what makes home, the new issue of the acclaimed anthology spotlights never-before-published stories, essays, and poetry by Edwidge Danticat, Herta Müller, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Gregory Pardlo, Kay Ryan, Aleksandar Hemon, and many more.

In light of the current global migrant movements and daily updates about the rise of homelessness in parts of America and elsewhere, reflecting on the idea and meaning of home has gained new urgency. On the night, John Freeman will be joined by novelist and film maker Xiaolu Guo, NBCC member and writer Kerri Arsenault, London based novelist Nadifa Mohamed and Adania Shibli novelist, playwright and essayist. In their readings and conversations, the authors will talk about the necessity and wonder that is home.

Following the first two issues on the themes of “Arrival” and “Family,” Freeman’s circles a new topic whose definition is constantly challenged by the best of our writers: Home. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us back to the present, as he leaves his mother’s Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy, even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated place to claim, because of race–the everyday reality of which Danez Smith explores in a poem about an encounter at a bus stop–or because of other types of fraught history. Kerri Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village with her grandparents. Many readers and writers, meanwhile, turn to literature to find a home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favorite author. The third issue also includes Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta Müller, Amira Hass, and more, writers from around the world lend their voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose, and love a home.

The reading will by followed at around 21:30 by a celebration with DJ Lamin Fofana on the occassion of presenting you our new SAVVY Contemporary publication:The Incantation of the Disquieting Muse: On Divinity, Supra-Realities or the Exorcisement of Witchery (edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Federica Bueti):

How do witchery phenomena and practices manifest within cultural, economical, political, religious and scientific spaces in Africa and beyond? This publication is a compendium to the eponymous exhibition project and public programme curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio atSAVVY Contemporary, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut South Africa in the framework of the project African Futures. Through an exhibition and a series of invocations, the project considered witchery as an epistemological space and a medium of continuities between the African continent and its Diaspora. The publication includes essays by Erna Brodber, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Vladimir Lucien, Percy Mabandu, and Greg Tate a.o, and visual contributions by artists Georges Adéagbo, Haris Epaminonda, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Emeka Ogboh, Priscilla Rezende and Minnette Vari a.o.

This publication has been generously supported by Goethe-Institut South Africa via TURN Fund der Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

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