Simon Asencio: Performance ‘Left / Write! (Rescript)’

New Narrative is an experimental writing movement that emerged in the San Francisco poetry scene in the late 1970s around writing workshops held at the Small Press Traffic bookstore by Bruce Boone and Robert Glück. The term was coined to describe experiments that used gossip, promiscuity, fax, lists, non-narrative elements, pieces of news and slanders as vehicles to write narratives. Emerging from the context of the civil rights, the black movements and the sexual liberation in the US, New Narrative appears as a motley crew of poets, writers and activists who examined poetic forms that could address their lives. Through personal, relational and transgressive writings, New Narrative experiments generated an active and emancipatory approach to language.

In the aftermath of the first Reagan election, members of the movement envisioned a conference to gather grassroots poetry groups and to reflect about the politics of their life and work. The Left/Write conference, held in 1981 at the Noe Valley Ministry, SF, was an attempt to elaborate political solidarity through literary practices. Partly artistic, educational and political, the conference convened 300 writers over two days through workshops, discussions, exhibitions and events. The conference took place once and was never repeated.

Left/Write! (Rescript) is a performative study situation that examines the conditions of emergence of such event, through the method of reenactment.
Using the transcript of the conference as a score for conversation, reading and organizing, the session will look into ways of learning from there and then in order to examine our commitments to here(s) and now(s).

Left/Write! (Rescript) will take place in the frame of the Summer Course: Text as an Artistic Medium and will be collectively developed with its participants.

Simon Asencio
Using research methodologies specific to performance, philology and critical pedagogy, the work of Simon Asencio takes the form of performances, publications, exhibitions, collective study situations and co-creation projects.

His current research focuses on the forms of sociability generated by textual practices, particularly the relationship between poetical practice and political engagement. Since 2021 he has been developing a performative translation of Anon, an unfinished essay by Virginia Woolf on the ethics of anonymity and the survival of rhapsodes. In 2022, he was an associate researcher at a-pass / advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels with his research Quire Whids. He is currently working on the transcriptions of the political and literary conference Left/Write! (1981, San Francisco) with the aim of developing a performative reconstruction.

Simon is professor of performance at Marseille Art Academy.

This event is part of the program of activations for the exhibition Vaginal Davis: HOFPFISTEREI. More information about the exhibition here and about the program here.

This exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as part of the exhibition Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product. The museum presents a major retrospective of Vaginal Davis’s work while, in parallel, Index is the locus for research on her text production. Vaginal Davis’s solo exhibition Magnificent Product is initiated by Moderna Museet and extends across several locations in Stockholm: Moderna Museet, Nationalmuseum, Accelerator, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Tensta konsthall and MDT (Moderna Dansteatern). Each institution highlights a different aspect of Vaginal Davis’s expansive practice.