‘Perception is Reading’ with contributions from Sylvia Mae Gorelick, Mira Mattar, Nikhil Vettukattil & Kylie Gilchrist

Cashmere Radio presents Perception is Reading: a special commission that investigates the relationship between reading, imagination, interruption, and everyday experience. The piece features readings by Sylvia Mae Gorelick, Nikhil Vettukattil, and Mira Mattar, organized and produced by Kylie Gilchrist and Cashmere Radio. It was originally broadcast at 17:00 CET on July 9 2017 on Cashmere, alongside partners Reboot.fm and 88,4 Berlin fm.

Drawing on the specific qualities of radio, this program asks how experience is registered in the bodies and memories of individuals, and how individuals mediate collective histories by transmitting experience through bodies of text. Each contributor reads a note or unpublished text that is based upon a citation of another author’s work. Each note is read in three iterations, echoing the relationship between memory and everyday experience:

– Present: the note is read in the form it was written.

– Future: the note as read as what it became, or what it could be.

– Past: the note is read as what it was, or could have been.

The program itself is based on a citation of Walter Benjamin’s unpublished fragment, ‘Perception is Reading’. It is part of an ongoing project titled Notes, that collects unpublished fragments of texts by writers and artists, centered on a given theme. 

A PDF booklet with transcriptions of each contributors’ texts is available for free download here.

Contributors:

Sylvia Mae Gorelick is a poet, writer, and translator based in New York City. Her chapbooks include Olympians, we are breathless (Poetry will be made by all!, 2014) and Seven Poems for Bill Berkson (Kostro Editions, 2009). Her work has appeared in various anthologies including In|Filtration (Station Hill, 2016) and For Bill, Anything (Pressed Wafer, 2015). The University of Chicago Press published her translation of Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paolo D’Iorio in 2016, and her translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre is forthcoming from Exact Change Press.

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is a contributing editor at Mute and co-runs a small press. She recently edited the first critical anthology on Chris Kraus, You Must Make Your Death Public: A collection of texts and media on the work of Chris Kraus, and co-edited Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis. Some of her work has recently been published in The Coelacanth Journal and Datableed. She lives in southeast London. More of her writing can be found online or via twitter.

Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist and writer based in London. Recent exhibitions include ‘Dream Works’ at Lethaby Gallery, London (2016) and ‘Cosmopolitan – Universal – Cinema’ at Close-Up, London, and the Arnolfini, Bristol (2016). ‘Cosmopolitan – Universal – Cinema’ was performed by Javon Bennett, Ana Berkenhoff and Tanya Singh. Stan Iordanov assisted with sound design. More information on Nikhil’s work can be found at www.freedomfrominformation.net.

Kylie Gilchrist is a London-based writer and editor. She has served as co-editor of Notes, an ongoing editorial project that collects unpublished fragments of texts centered on a given theme. Notes primarily exists as a set of publications organized by various collaborators, with two collections published by Publication Studio: Notes: On Value (ed. Anna de Filippi, Kylie Gilchrist, and Megan Stockton, 2013) and Notes: On Administration (ed. Kylie Gilchrist and Megan Stockton, 2016).