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An Anti-Guide To Foreplay with Anna Moschovakis and Danielle LaFrance
January 24 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PST
Tuesday, January 24 at 6pm, join Massy Arts Society Massy Books, Talonbooks, Book*hug and Coffee House Press for An Anti-Guide To Foreplay. A double launch featuring two dissertations on desire: Participation by Anna Moschovakis and #postdildo by Danielle LaFrance.
From suspicion to sexual objects, LaFrance and Moschovakis offer a pleasure-filled evening of reading from their new works—inviting us to be read in the process. This electric conversation will be hosted by artist and cultural worker, Kay Higgins, whose impressively expansive experience acts as a mixer to these two distinct voices.
This project has been made possible by the Government of Canada. Ce projet a été rendu possible grâce au gouvernement du Canada.
Registration is free, open to all and required for entrance.
Purchase at the event:
Participation by Anna Moschovakis
#postdildo by Danielle LaFrance
Venue & Accessibility
The event will be hosted at the Massy Arts Gallery, at 23 East Pender Street in Chinatown, Vancouver.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible and a gender-neutral washroom is on-site. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes.
For more on accessibility including parking, seating, venue measurements and floor plan, and how to request ASL interpretation please visit: massyarts.com/accessibility
Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are mandatory (N95 masks are recommended as they offer the best protection). We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.
The Books
Participation by Anna Moschovakis (Book*hug and Coffee House Press, 2022) was born Somewhere between a fear of the essay form and an inchoate understanding of the term “detranslation.” A precarious novel about love & comradeship, the discomforts of desire, forms and functions of labor, and the embodied experience of reading and being read. The novel “probes what it is to think about work and capitalism and desire—and anger, and freedom, and care” (Bookforum), it offers “an anti-guide for the current moment” (The Toronto Star). It is full of mediators, translators, analysts, and those who are as suspicious of them as they are of themselves. It’s trying as hard as it can.
#postdildo (Talonbooks 2022) emerged as some space for Danielle LaFrance to air her dildos. After a carnal encounter with garbage, they think and write through the limitlessness and limitations of sexuality, communication, and desire. Focusing on the dildo as sexual object and social relation, LaFrance asks, “How shall You fuck without causing harm?” What came before #postdildo if not internet porn, the confession booth, colonial capitalism, settler sexuality, patriarchy, and feminism, all providing a blueprint for how inadequately to be touched and fucked? What comes after delights? #postdildo is a mass of contradictions that more often than not finds a lot of dis/pleasure in a lot of refusal.
The Authors
Anna Moschovakis works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her books include the novels Participation and Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, and poetry books They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. Her long poem in process, Preliminary Notes on Risk, was excerpted in a chaplet from Belladonna* and in folder magazine online. She has translated David Diop, Annie Ernaux, Marcelle Sauvageot, Albert Cossery, Robert Bresson and others, and is at work on a collaborative translation (with the author) of Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems. She is a student of plants and herbalism, a member of Ugly Duckling Presse and of Bushel Collective, an experimental mixed-use storefront space in Delhi, NY, near where she lives.
Danielle LaFrance is a writer, researcher, and philosopher. She authors the poetry books (often accompanied by an essay-form) #postdildo (Talonbooks 2022), JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks 2019), Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks, 2016) and species branding (Capilano University Editions, 2010). Other poetry and critical writing have appeared in such magazines and journals asASAP/Journal, The Capilano Review, LESTE, Tripwire, and Organism for Poetic Research. They collaborated on a co-reading and journal making endeavour About a Bicycle (with Anahita Jamali Rad) and currently on an intertextual sound project Yes, Sydo (with Josh Rose).
Hosted by
Kay Higgins is an artist and cultural worker based in Vancouver on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She was a co-founder of Artspeak Gallery and the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres, is co-proprietor (with Kathy Slade) of the artist press Publication Studio Vancouver and was Executive Director of the artist-run space UNIT/PITT Projects from 2010-2019. She is currently Head of Publishing at the Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and Editor of ECU Press. Her work has included manufactured publications, handmade artist books, public inscription, photography, and internet-based projects. She has been a curator, editor, factory and warehouse labourer, technology consultant, and candidate for municipal office. She is also one half of the electronic music duo Vomit Fraud (with Brady Cranfield).