Join the Poetry Center of Chicago at Read/Write Library for the April installment of the Six Points Reading Series!
This month we are pleased to welcome Amira Hanafi on April 26 from 6:30-8:00 PM. Curated and hosted by Natasha Mijares.
Amira Hanafi will present her project entitled, A Dictionary of the Revolution, a documentation of public political speech following the 2011 uprising in Egypt.
The project consists of a series of 125 imagined dialogues woven from transcription of 200 interviews conducted in 2014. The interviews were conducted with a box of vocabulary cards containing frequently used terms in public political speech after the uprising. Hanafi will present texts from a few of the dialogues with English translations onto index cards, and ask each audience member to read an excerpt so that they can construct a collective conversation in the room. This solidarity-building exercise will illuminate the current political climate in the U.S. in comparison to the climate that Hanafi documented in Egypt following the uprising.
There is a published translation of the project and a digital publication in Arabic.
Amira Hanafi is an artist, writer and cultural worker. She co-founded a network of youth-run media outlets in marginalized communities of Egypt, and manages an online resource for Egyptian artists. From 2011 to 2013, she held the role of Programme Director and Curator of artewella art space, leading the organization from an independent artists’ project to a community art space providing workshops, residencies, exhibitions and opportunities for collaboration. She is the author of Forgery, Minced English, and is currently working on A Dictionary of the Revolution, a documentation of the Egyptian revolution in the popular colloquial.
Read/Write Library collects, preserves and provides access to community media to promote cultural production and civic engagement. Through public programs, a growing collection of over 5,000 publications and our open source catalog, we strive to raise the visibility of work produced by all Chicagoans and reveal threads across generations, neighborhoods and cultures while encouraging inquiry into and ownership of the historical record.
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