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RITA MUNUS: WRITE IT SPEAK IT MOVE IT
Screening event co-presented with LUX
Free, book here: https://bit.ly/2zyJSO1
Wednesday 11 September 2019, 7–8.30pm
Sop from Rita Munus in collaboration with Charlotte Procter (LUX) present a screening event as part of the Write It Speak It Move It project. The screening is an attempt to describe the complex relationship between a life lived with chronic illness and medical institutions; including diagnoses, medications and medicalised narratives which often simplify the sick person’s sense of self and agency.
The films chosen present contrasts to formalised routes of medical care and instead draw on friendship and the informal structure of mutual care and support given from our chosen family – our friends, which often passes unacknowledged but can be life saving. The screening will include works by Carolyn Lazard, Anne McGuire, Rosalind Nashashibi and Romily Alice Walden amongst others.
Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from Spirit of 2012.
Curator :
Rita Munus are a collective that runs writing workshops and events with a focus on radical creative practice and process as a vehicle for topical discussion, exploration, play and catharsis. The collective is made up of writer Charlotte Heather and artist Sop and focuses predominantly on issues of chronic illness, queerness, otherness and capitalism, engaging with and prioritising participants who have direct experience with the themes.
The first series of workshops ILLTH looked specifically at chronic illness, the sick body and capitalism. The sick body is seen as ‘less than’ within a capitalist framework, because it cannot participate in production to a ‘satisfactory’ level. But the sick body is not ‘less than’. Focus on ‘getting better’ or ‘being well’ puts unnecessary force on the sick body to achieve something that for many chronically ill people is impossible. Often this actually makes the body more sick. Capitalism leads to over exertion – capitalism leads to chronic illness – illness struggles to fit into capitalism, thus the circular plot. There is a distinct parallel between ILLTH’s focus on process, not production, and the need for the sick body to be able to focus on just being, as opposed to the binaries of sick and well and ‘getting better’.
Future workshops will cover mental health, the pharmaceutical industry, the physical body and its movement, gender identity and sexual identities and behaviours, all in conversation with capitalism.
“The workshops let you write, but what you write is not for others consumption. You do not create a final product. You enter an ongoing series of discussions with each other on subjects which apply to the participants. You write something that you can do whatever you want with. You write because you have something to say, even if it is only to yourself. You write to play; with words, ideas, the world, yourself, others. You do not write to commodify your feelings, to conform to production, or to make yourself palatable to others. You do not write to be consumed, you write to experience writing.”
rita – to tear, scratch, write
munus – service performed for the community, duty, work
8 Angel Mews
London N1 9HH
+44 (0)20 7278 8226