After the success of Equinoxes online, the Foundation has welcomed in its spaces a poesy dedicated evening and invited twenty poets and readers.
Theme of the evening: FRAGILE.
It is also the occasion to celebrate the opening of the John Giorno Foundation in New York.
We are all fragile and resilient too. Fragile is our world, which we have achieved with tenfold acuity during this strange year, between confinement and freedom, crystallizations and metamorphoses, violence and illusions.
On September 19, 2020, for the “John Giorno Poetry Day”, the voices of poets, readers, artists, performers from all walks of life, from Turkey to Belgium, from France to the United States, all aware that fragility is fundamentally linked to our very humanity, our finitude as individuals, will resound at the Thalie Foundation on the theme of “The art of being fragile”.
Accepting vulnerability, our own as human beings, women, men, others, and the vulnerability of our world, means being aware that we each have only one piece of life, only one skin of sorrow. For poets, the only way out is to celebrate life, because if ours is infinitely brittle, Life itself is infinitely powerful, the life of which John Giorno wrote on, to close a poem dedicated to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin «and some others»: «the very worst is happening now, life goes on.
Life goes on. Poetry goes on. John Giorno is dead but we celebrate his poetry, poetry that has the capacity to give audible form to the worst. Poetry as life itself, has a full capacity for self-repair, a capacity that we sometimes seem to forget is within our reach. And among the questions that «Fragile» aims at raising are: how can we nourish and bring into existence the world in which we would like to live tomorrow? Which world to build, which society, how? And what can poets do to bring to life a local identity, a global ecosophy? How to «Welcome the Flowers»?
Very fragile readings-performances that reveal snippets of aesthetic vulnerability and the “vulnerable force” of creation.
Curating: Nathalie Guiot, Barbara Polla and Pascale Barret
Guest readers: Pascale Barret, Greta Bellamacina, Boris Bergmann, Janet Biggs, Haleh Chinikar, Carole Douillard, Céline Fribourg, Kendell Geers, Sandra Ghosn, Christine Guinard, Nathalie Guiot, Dana Hoey, Nikias Imhoof, Ali Kazma, Ellen Leblond-Schrader, Violaine Lochu, Randa Maddah, Naomi Melville, Robert Montgomery, Charles Moody, Shannon Plumb, Barbara Polla, Sarah Riggs, Vincent Scarito, Frank Smith, Nathalie Vanderlinden.
In partnership with the Centre Pompidou and the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris
