introduction Barbara Leda Kenny / Libreria Tuba
Q&A with Ilenia Caleo e Maddalena Fragnito / Master Studi e Politiche di Genere di Roma Tre
And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us.
– Valeria Luiselli
Acclaimed Mexican-American writer, Valeria Luiselli is the author of novels, essays, and hybrid formats between the two genres. Her work explores the experience of uprooting, the violence associated with borders, and detention. Real-world data, collected through direct acoustic documentation and archival materials, intertwine with speculative elements, and a constant self-criticism that challenges conventional notions of authorship.
Impatient with the artifices of traditional realism, her pen strips away dramatic tones with dry and sharp prose, layering different themes in the entanglement of everyday dimensions and diary-like autofiction. Luiselli thinks through the porous margins of languages, geographies, literary forms, and invisibilized stories to kindle narrative and sonic movements at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.
In Sometimes and Across, a lecture conceived for Short Theatre 2024, Valeria Luiselli invites us to reflect starting with a series of questions. What happens to our imagination and capacity for creativity during socio-political crises? Do circumstances like wars, authoritarianism, exile or different forms of confinement ignite or stifle our creative drive? Can we work when we are living in fear? What does violence —political, environmental, racial, and gender-based — do to our bodies and minds and how do we document that and write about it? How can imagination be used as a powerful political instrument — one that is mindful of the intersection of our aesthetic and ethical concerns — and how can it also be shaped to be an end in itself?
Valeria Luiselli will also be present at Short Theatre 2024 with the workshop Acoustic Shadows.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. Writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, and Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in Forty Questions). Her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages. She is a professor at Bard College.
in collaboration with Libreria Tuba the “Modulo Arti” of the Master Studi e Politiche di Genere dell’Università Roma Tre
thanks to La Nuova Frontiera
ph. Diego Berruecos / Gatopardo
