READING RHYTHMS CLUB

“The reason you hate reading is because the ruling class benefits from illiteracy. [They] want you literate enough to be able to work for them, but not so literate that you realize how badly the working class gets fucked over in this world-making. [...] Because then what? A mass of people realizing we can create and recreate everything we see and touch to something kinder for us?”—Ismatu Gwendolyn

📚🎼Reading to have a critical understanding of the world around us, to expand our capacities for world-making, to make sense of our experiences and find a place of healing. Reading collectively, to hold text up to the light of our experiences, to weave our voices in-between words, to build an informed ground for collective struggle. Reading not as a disembodied activity done in isolation, but as a way to convene with others and grow stronger together.

Join us for this conversation on the urgency of collective reading, and the obstacles put in its way, on Saturday March 29th from 14.00 to 17.00 at Snackbar Frieda. This event, organised in collaboration with our publisher HumDrumPress, accompanies our process of putting together a publication that documents last year’s reading sessions and reflects on why we think reading together is so important. During the event, HumDrumPress will introduce the format of their ‘Open Book’ series and we will put the texts ‘you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)’ by Ismatu Gwendolyn and Theory as Liberatory Practice by bell hooks in dialogue with each other.

📖This event is part of the HumDrumPress: “Open Book” event series. An experiment in making the voices, ideas and content usually contained in a physical publication - typically the last stage of the publishing process - publicly accessible and visible from the very first moment in the publishing cycle. HumDrumPress is a publishing project that experiments towards publishing as a commons. With homes in Rotterdam and Berlin, HumDrumPress produces collaboration-focused publications, hosts public gatherings, and maintains a common-based publishing model as part of an expanded, experimental publishing practice.