Theme: sacred bodies, oozing bodies, a look at the poetry of queer bodies
May 3rd, 2025 – 2 PM to 5 PM @ Artexte's reading room
Artexte invite you to the third edition of its new educational activity series, which pairs contemporary visual arts and literature. Artexte’s Book Club offers three seasonal activities, during which independent Montreal bookstores are invited to choose a theme that will be embodied and discussed through excerpts from recent titles from their shelves. This cycle of participatory and collaborative gatherings is an opportunity to discover new contemporary artistic practices, the work of underrepresented artists and authors in the cultural landscape, and above all to gain new insight into the centre’s documentary collection.
For the third edition of our Book Club on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025, we are pleased to collaborate with L’Euguélionne feminist and queer bookstore and solidarity cooperative, as well as guest authors Sayaka Araniva-Yanez and Olivia Tapiero who, through a selection of book excerpts by Nicholas Dawson from Peur pietà (2024), Sayaka Araniva-Yanez’s Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste (2024), and Un carré de poussière (2025) by Olivia Tapiero, we invite you to join us in exploring the theme of sacred bodies, oozing bodies, a look at the poetry of queer bodies.
About the selected theme:
In Cruiser l’utopie : l’après et ailleurs de l’advenir queer, researcher and university professor José Esteban Muñoz writes: [w]e have never been queer, and yet for us queerness exists as an identity that we can distil from the past and use to imagine a future. The future is the realm of queerness. Queerness is a mode of structuring, educated desire that allows us to see and feel beyond the swamp of the present. (p. 19)
Contamination, mutation, transformation, rot, and rewrite, invading our remains for a radiant future, the rhythm of images and breath in writing: everything bumps together in the sentence, there is an urgency – when the text is digested, a hole appears; it lets us explore and experiment, within our own plural imaginations, intoxication (ejecting ourselves outside the norms, into explosions, into chaos), virtuality, investigation, the bodies of languages.
Alongside l’Euguélionne, the feminist bookstore and solidarity cooperative, this third Artexte’s Book Club activity will offer an opportunity to celebrate the metamorphoses and transgressions that emerge in the poetry of queer bodies.
How to take part in Artexte’s Book Club?
You can participate in one, two, or all three Book Club activities. To do so:
1 – Get your copies of the books excerpts to be discussed below, in digitized format, and at Artexte for the printed versions [in French only]:
- Araniva-Yanez, Sayaka. Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste. Montréal, QC: triptyque, 2024. [p. 27]
- Dawson, Nicholas. Peur pietà. Montréal, QC: Éditions du Noroît, 2024. [p. 82, 91]
- Tapiero, Olivia. Un carré de poussière. Montréal, QC: Éditions de la rue Dorion, 2025. [p. 59, 113]
2 – Take a look at our educational booklet to familiarize yourself with the authors’ works and the selected books to be discussed. The educational booklet is available HERE in digitized format and at Artexte in printed form.
3 – Come to the Book Club in the Artexte reading room and join the conversation. No registration required.
About the collaborating bookshop:
The feminist and queer bookstore L’Euguélionne is a non-profit solidarity cooperative. It offers a wide selection of new and second-hand books, zines, and printed art. It specializes in activist litterature and aspires to be a small raft in the ocean of cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism. L’Euguélionne also offers a variety of literary and community events: book launches, book clubs, talks, workshops, discussions, and more.
Find out more about L’Euguélionne bookshop and discover their selection of books HERE
Visit the bookstore at 1426 Beaudry Street. Montréal, H2L 3E5