Slow Reading Club is a semi-fictional reading group initiated in 2016 by choreographer Bryana Fritz and artist Henry Andersen. They deal in constructed situations for collective and individual reading. Central to their collective practice is a question about how meaning passes between bodies in the act of reading. If reading is an action that is "performed", might it also be choreographed? And might such choreographies provide an escape from dominant patterns of reading-as-communication? SRC seeks to occupy and eroticise the space of transmission between text and reader, reader and reader, text and text. They want to dwell in the unstable space of reading itself, to intensify what Spivak calls “the possible menace of a space outside of language” that is opened up in reading and in love. 

Slow Reading Club organise large-scale collective reading sessions, make and distribute bootleg publications, produce exhibitions, and give performances. At present they are producing a collectively written road novel set on America’s highways and spat up from and nourished by its pulp literature. 

In this lecture the duo will try to sketch out some of what it might mean to think and make work from the side of the reader. How to locate production within the act of reception, as a facet of reception.  The lecture will focus on the threshold of reading/writing, limit cases where the two activities can’t be neatly separated such as translation, manuscripting, or fan fiction. The hope is that through thinking as a reader one may be able to unbalance some of the stability and determination traditionally ascribed to the author/artist and open onto something more happenstance, more collective, more joyous. 

Slow Reading Club premiered at kunstenfestivaldesarts 2017, in Brussels as part of an evening titled Before the Codes. Since then they have presented reading sessions, exhibitions, and performed work in contexts including MAK Schindler House (Los Angeles), Lafayette Anticipation (Paris), Bergen Kunsthal, Kunstcentrum Vooruit (Ghent), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe), La Loge (Brussels), Radialsystem (Berlin), Dortmunder Kunstverein, Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Louise Dany (Oslo),  Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (Hamburg), and Bâtard Festival (Brussels / Amsterdam).