Crop from De strijd om de broek, Cornelis van Kittensteyn, 1610–1663. Source: Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Saturday, June 22, 2024
4:00 PM
Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking
Performance produced by READING ROOM ROTTERDAM with ANDREA CELESTE LA FORGIA and GLORIYA AVGUST
We are excited to be hosting Reading Room Rotterdam later
this month—a roaming library organised, facilitated and transformed by artist and part-time librarian Marika Vandekraats. The library will take over our outside terrace with a newly developed performance by Andrea Celeste La Forgia and Gloriya Avgust that responds to the site of the Justus van Effencomplex.
Blending fiction and archival material, Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking is a polyphonic choral piece that brings into focus the idiosyncrasies of supposedly class-related female ‘troublemaking’. In Vrouwenproblemen, she is found everywhere: in the prison, the factory, the workshop, the brothel, the housing estate, the roof, the kitchen, the bedroom, the street. She incarnates everyone: the mother, the worker, the nurse, the unemployed, the witch, the prisoner, the artist, the ‘we’, the ‘I’. Guess what? They all turned out to be exactly the same person. In Vrouwenproblemen, she lingers with the trouble, moving across non-linear historical accounts as a strategic act of constant dispossession and repositioning.
Vrouwenproblemen: Spinning the mechanisms of troublemaking will be performed by Sarah Atzori, Julia Dahee Hong, Melanie Hyams, Gloriya Avgust and Andrea Celeste La Forgia.
Accessibility
The performance will take place on the terrace, which is wheelchair accessible through the exhibition space. A gender-neutral restroom on the first floor is accessible by stairs; an elevator is not available. The performance will be in English with Dutch translation.
Biographies
ANDREA CELESTE LA FORGIA (1995, Italy) is a working-class artist based in Rotterdam. Using family experience and history as a starting point, often in dialogue with local history and archival research, she explores the condition of the contemporary working class, the personal and political implications of class dispossession, the evolution of a multi-generational working class and the meaning of class struggle today.
GLORIYA AVGUST (1993, Bulgaria) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice blurs memoir, fiction, and feminist history to channel corporeal and semantic notions of womanhood. Engaging with the materiality of writing, she twists and morphs her subjects in a speculative swirl of possibilities, exploring gender, ancestry, the psychic, and the erotic as political tools for affirming one’s life force in the world.
READING ROOM ROTTERDAM is a roaming library that offers an exchange of mediums of knowledge, be it through dinners, workshops, gardens, or text. Reading Room Rotterdam is organized, facilitated and transformed by Marika Vandekraats, an artist and part-time librarian based in Rotterdam.