CURA. presents a reading event in collaboration with Crack Reading Club. Founded by Sofia Gallarate and Caroline Drevait in 2020, CRC is a reading event in which multidisciplinary authors perform selected texts around themes that cut across heterogeneous genres and formats, ranging from experimental poetry to narrative writing and other hybrid textual forms. Previous editions of Crack Reading Club include Good Morning Lucidity at Baleno International, XXXtremely Online at Basement Roma, SEXY BEAST at Ermes Ermes, and CRC X BAAB.
Readings will be performed by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Jahān Khājavi & Adrien Fischer. Jahān Khājavi & Adrien Fischer will be reading Burchiello.
The event will take place in the first-floor room dedicated to UNAROMA LIVE.
Free admission until capacity is reached.
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From February 13 to 18, the trace of the intervention produced by CURA. will be on view within the exhibition space.
Crack Reading Club X CURA.
Texts by Jahān Khājavi and Allison Grimaldi Donahue
Invited to inhabit the space and time of CURA., Crack Reading Club (Sofia Gallarate and Caroline Drevait) activates a series of alternative texts in different formats, developed in Rome and connected to the city. The aim is to bring to light lateral aspects of the Roman scene through a selection of writings that have contributed to shaping an alternative narrative of Rome. The selected texts are printed in 101 copies each, stacked in the space and made directly available to the public, leaving a trace for the days to come.
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CURA. is a leading editorial and curatorial platform for international critical discourse, a performative hub aimed at the investigation of the contemporary art field, critical debate, digital culture, and the “new now.” Thanks to a network of international collaborations, CURA. publishes the biannual eponymous magazine CURA., and is engaged in curating exhibitions, biennials, festivals, and site-specific projects, including the artistic direction of Basement Roma, focused on producing group and solo exhibitions by international artists. CURA. is also engaged in editorial activity with book production, multimedia content, and multidisciplinary collaborations. It has additionally curated the 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennial (2021), and is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Basement Art Assembly Biennial (BAAB).
JAHAN KHAJAVI (Fresno, California, USA, 1986) is "the best kind of pervert" (Farid Matuk) who composes "wildly amusing and explicit queer poetry" (Hamish Bowles, Vogue) "with elements of swagger and sex" (Rob McLennan) that "luxuriates in the labor of the real" (PJ Lombardo, Tripwire) and "juggles truly absurd comedy and frank body talk with overwhelming tenderness and genuine corporeal joy" (Louis Fratino, Mousse). Khajavi’s "fabulous, fierce first collection" (Moira Egan) Feast of the Ass (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), is "one of the most unique books of recent memory" (Johannes Göransson), which "at once flourishes and makes a flourish of classical Persian forms" (Joyelle McSweeney) "in which the sacred and profane fuck on the page" (After 8 Books) in "an explosion of queer diasporic sexuality" (Hasti) "fragrant of jasmine and trace fecal matter" (Charlie Stuip, Grotto).
ALLISON GRIMALDI DONAHUE works across text and performance, exploring the ways in which language and writing can move between individual and collective experience. She is the author of Composing Ourselves/Comporci, The History of Breathing, Body to Mineral, and On Endings, and the translator of Carla Lonzi's Self-Portrait.