Lateral Roma invites Laura McLean-Ferris and Tabea Marschall to present a two-part reading event, with a brief introduction by Jazmina Figueroa. Laura McLean-Ferris will read excerpts from a recent body of work, in which she writes through Agnès Varda's film Cléo from 5 to 7 to explore heightened experiences of the present tense. Tabea Marschall will then give a performance lecture exploring Kathy Acker’s writings, pulling from materials found in the Kathy Acker Reading Room at the University of Cologne.

Lateral Roma is an independent project space in the Appio Latino neighborhood that, since 2020, has grown beyond exhibition formats to highlight critical practices of artistic exchange and production.

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Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in Paris. Her work has appeared in 4Columns, Artforum, ArtReview, Bookforum, frieze, Flash Art International, Mousse, and many publications. She was the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and her short-form collection The Lacustrine was published in 2016. Formerly, she was Chief Curator at Swiss Institute, New York, where she worked from 2015-2021. She organized the first survey exhibition of Rosemary Mayer, which was accompanied by the books Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching (2023) and The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer (2022).

Tabea Marschall is a writer and curator based in Berlin. Her research draws on feminist writing practices, exploring reading and writing as embodied, relational techniques. Using situated, multi-voiced narration, she examines how authorship emerges through citation, montage, and textual re-use. She teaches seminars at art academies, including Universität der Künste Berlin and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Marschall writes independently for galleries, magazines, and institutions, and is currently developing an artist’s book on Kathy Acker that reads her writing through her library, foregrounding appropriation as a method. She works across writing, research, and curatorial practice, independently and in institutional contexts, including the Julia Stoschek Foundation.

Jazmina Figueroa is a writer and artist based in Berlin and also co-runs the Lateral Roma project space.

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The event is organized in collaboration with Istituto Svizzero.