Talk
Elvia Wilk / Writing Ecosystems
No writing or art exists in a vacuum. Everybody has a body and everybody has a context. Bodies of work have contexts, too.
Once in the world, literature and artwork travel and collide with other works and bodies, affecting the contexts in which they were produced—in often mysterious or immeasurable ways. In the age of extinction, it becomes ever more important to track the way the scale of the personal relates to the scale of the planetary. In this talk, I will discuss the concept of ecosystems literature, a genre that explicitly reflects on the complex reciprocality between individuals and the world, by reconsidering the relationship between "figure and ground" in art. I will describe an approach to writing that doesn’t foreground the writer (me) but does reveal her (my) subject position and stance. I will also speak about the afterlives of texts as they enter and alter existing ecosystems.
Register for this zoom webinar here
Elvia Wilk
Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape. Her essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications like The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, n+1, The Paris Review Online, Artforum, BOMB, Frieze, WIRED, and The White Review. She received a 2019/2020 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute. She's currently a contributing editor at e-flux journal and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence.
The lecture is organized by the Academy of Fine Art and co-hosted with the Art and Craft department.