Literary Alchemy

Rome Literary Alchemy Tuesday, May 28, 2024 – 6:00 to 9:00pm CET Spazio Supernova Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, 1A Free admission. This evening of readings and screenings seeks to explore the challenges of transforming, adapting, and modifying text in relation to other media such as films, music, and podcasts. Adapting text often involves making specific choices to give the work another experiential quality. Narrative, storytelling, seriality, and other experimental adaptive solutions emerge from this creative moment.Together with writers, directors, and musicians, we will experience their work through readings and screenings and discuss the necessary negotiations that were used to transform textual elements into something else. The form and function of textual adaptation is constantly evolving; the interconnectedness of media will direct the discussion toward thinking about adaptation as product and process.Participants include writers Katie Kitamura (2024 Fellow), Claudia Durastanti (2015 Italian Fellow), and Chiara Barzini; directors William Oldroyd and Alexandra de la Mora; and composers Baldwin Giang (2024 Fellow) and Kate Soper (2024 Fellow). The event will be held in English.

Anja Kirschner & David Panos

London until 21/6/2009 Chisenhale Gallery  64 Chisenhale Road E3 A new film and installation Chisenhale Gallery premieres a new film and installation by Anja Kirschner and David Panos co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is a film based on the inferred prison encounters between the 18th century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe, the ghostwriter of Sheppard’s -autobiography’, set in the wake of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 – Britain’s first recorded financial crisis.  A critical costume drama constructed from a patchwork of historical, literary, and popular sources, the film’s fragmented narrative structure explores the connections between representation, speculation and the discourses of high and low culture that emerged in the early 18th century and remain relevant to the present day. Filmed in the Chisenhale Gallery space, The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is presented within an installation fabricated from elements of the original set palying on the notion of the -historical construct’. Thursday 4 June, 7pm Benedict Seymour, Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, discusses representation, value, finance captial and primitive accumulation as refracted in The Last Days of Jack Sheppard.
Anja Kirschner (b.1977, Munich) and David Panos (b.1971, Athens) live and work in London. Their recent film, Trail of the Spider (53mins, UK, 2008), a -western’ filmed in Hackney and Essex, premiered at Tate Modern followed by a week-long show as part of -Nought to Sixty’ at the ICA and a LUX screening at Chat’s Palace in Hackney. Polly II – Plan for a Revolution in Docklands (30mins, UK, 2006), a dystopian pirate adventure, has been screened widely both in the UK and abroad. Venues included Tate Modern, BFI Southbank, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, NAi, Netherlands and the Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany.  The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is approximately 55 minutes long and will be screened on the hour every hour. (photo Anja)