8 November 2024, 2:00pm–5:00pm

Online via Zoom

Free book via Eventbrite

This afternoon online session is the first of the 2024-2026 series of Spineless Wonders events and exhibitions looking at small press publications, textual objects and artists books in the context of the diverse range of languages spoken across the UK. In particular we will be addressing post-Brythonic languages, dialects, and linguistic hybridity within the framework of a contemporary multilingual Britain.

The ‘European and minority languages’ event will look at multilingual and minority language publications in the Special Collections holdings at University College Library and Senate House library, raising questions as to the extent of language diversity in the collection.

This will be followed by presentations and discussions on the themes of translation, hybrid languages, the status of minority languages, and multilingual immigrant writing.

2:00–2:05 pm: Introduction and Welcome

Clare Lees, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study; Sharon Morris, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL; Tim Brennan.

2:05–3:15 pm: Special Collections: chaired by Clare Lees

Presentations of little-known material from Special Collections holdings by:
Liz Lawes: Subject Liaison Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art, Film Studies Collection Manager: Small Press Collections, UCL; 
Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, Lecturer in Library and Archive Studies, Institute for Cultural Practices, John Rylands Institute and Library; 
Leila Kassir: Academic Librarian, British, US, Commonwealth & Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Senate House Library;
Tansy Barton: Academic Librarian: Manuscript and Book Studies, Senate House Library.

3:15–3:30pm: Break

3:30–4:50pm : Presentations and discussion: chaired by Tim Brennan

Mererid Puw Davies
Mererid Puw Davies is Professor of German Studies at UCL.
Mererid researches and publishes on many aspects of modern German literature, film and culture. She is also deeply interested in Welsh literatures and cultures, which is an increasing, often comparative focus in her work.
Mererid has worked extensively on the textual culture of the 1960s and 1970s protest movements in West Germany, a rich source of spineless wonders with its DIY texts, independent publishers, underground magazines and literature and ephemera.
She is also a poet interested in the translation of poetry, especially between lesser-used languages, and has worked with poets and translators in lesser-used languages across Europe.

Christine Kirubi: ‘Readings from WILDPLASSEN and Joueurs de Flute’: Readings and thoughts from two projects which work through translation as resonance, annotation, emanation, elaboration and correspondence between texts.
Christine Kirubi is a Fine Art Media tutor and BFA Critical Studies lead at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
dove / Christine Kirubi is an artist-poet-collaborator based in London. Their debut poetry collection WILDPLASSEN was published by the87press this year. Recent projects and performances include The Archive is a Gathering Place at Tate Britain in collaboration with Rhoda Boateng, The Blue House co-founded with Daniel Baker-Wells, and a collaborative improvisation at Décalé with petals Kalulé. Recent commissioned texts include Fabulous Musics published in response to Shenece Oretha's UAL 20/20 commission with Hepworth Wakefield and a note on audrey mbugua's dog published in the Jerwood Survey III catalogue in response to Ebun Sodipo's work.

Svetlana De Sequeira Costa: The Curator as Radical Translator: Reframing Leibniz's 'Drôle de Pensée' for a World in Flux.
Svetlana Sequeira Costa is the founding director of Arts Cabinet, a research-led arts organisation based in London and working globally. Svetlana is a curator, researcher, and organiser with experience of working internationally in the arts and culture, with private foundations, public institutions, artists and high net worth individuals. Svetlana’s current work focuses on setting up collaborations between artists and researchers, to produce innovative work that broadens people’s imagination and understanding of complex issues. Involving Higher Education institutions in the UK, Australia, Europe, and the US, with established Western artists and artists from Global South often from difficult territories such as Iran, North Africa and Latin America, the outcomes of these projects are disseminated through publications, events and learning labs. Svetlana is also a Research Fellow at the War Studies Department at King’s College London, Research Associate at the University of Agder (Norway) Fine Art Department, and undertaking a PhD at the Slade/UCL.

Ilektra Maipa: ‘The Lament of River Fishes: Poetic Allegories and the Aromanian Language.’
Ilektra Maipa:(b. 1989, Greece) studied Painting (Hons) at the Department of Visual & Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia, and later earned an MA (Hons) in Fine Art at the Manchester School of Art, Metropolitan University of Manchester, UK. She works across various media, including drawings, digital collages, installations, performances for the camera, and text. Her practice examines relationships between body and landscape, language and memory, and presence and absence. Maipa's work has been shown at Stereoma Audiovisual Arts Festival at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, Thessaloniki (2024), Glocalities at the Primarolia Festival, Patra (2023), Gonzo Unit (duo exhibition), Thessaloniki (2022), and the MATAROA Awards at Art Thessaloniki International Contemporary Art Fair (2021). Earlier exhibitions include Brave New World at K-Gold Gallery, Lesvos (2016) and Physis at the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Berlin (2013). In 2020, she received the ARTWORKS Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship.

Useful links
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Instagram

Godela Weiss-Sussex: 'From Minority Literature to Postmigrant Writing'
Godela Weiss-Sussex is a Professor of Modern German Literature, Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the School of Advanced Study, UoL. Godela Weiss-Sussex's main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile; multi- and translingualism; concepts of 'Heimat' and belonging. She currently works on exile family novels and on postmigrant German-Jewish writing.

Her recent projects include the edited collection Contested Communities. Small, Minority and Minor Literatures in Europe.