Tuesday 17th September: 6:30-8pm

READING: THE MOLLINO SET BY LYTLE SHAW + SOPHIE COLLINS

Chronicling on-site research commissioned from me by a mysterious Belgian graphic designer, the book tracks the Italian architect Carlo Mollino (1905-73), who designed the bulbous and baroque space of the Turin opera house, a set of windowless fantasy interiors in the city that may have functioned primarily as photographic backdrops, and several extreme Alpine structures, including an under-the-Matterhorn chalet for the then fastest man on skis, Leo Gasperl. Comparable perhaps to a Bond villain, Mollino drew simultaneously with both hands, wrote a treatise on downhill skiing, engineered and drove race cars at Le Mans, was a stunt pilot, and the designer of what was until very recently the most expensive piece of furniture ever bought at auction.

The more I looked into the emerging Mollino industry, however, the more it developed an unhealthy curiosity about me.And so this book documents my descent into the world of the “risotto giallo”—a northern Italian variant of the country’s thriller genre, a surprisingly dangerous domain of tyrant art collectors, car and motorcycle chases, and conceptual double-crosses, all presided over by 1960s Italian film music and the lush surfaces of mid-century moderne furniture.

Lytle Shaw is a New York–based writer. He teaches literature at New York University and theory at the School of Architecture, University of Limerick. His books include New Grounds for Dutch Landscape(OEI Editör, 2021),Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research(Stanford University Press, 2018), andThe Moiré Effect(Cabinet Books, 2012). Shaw has also published essays on artists including Zoe Leonard, Robert Smithson, Gerard Byrne, Paul McCarthy, and the Royal Art Lodge for institutions such as the Reina Sofia, the DIA Center, Whitechapel Gallery, De Hallen, and the Drawing Center.

Wednesday 25th September: 6:30-8:30pm

LAUNCH: SIDE CHARACTHERS BY LISA JONES

Join us & Electric Frog Press for the launch of ‘Side Characters’, Lisa's first collection of short stories.

A minor procedure, Dr Traynor had told me. You could barely call it surgery. Just another part of getting older, he reassured, with a conspiratorial wink and the kind of lilting, elderly laugh that I had only ever heard before in a life insurance advert. I woke up by the bins, a teddy-bear patterned bib fastened around my neck and stained with alphabetical pasta shapes that seemed to spell out the word “HYGNTHUFFA”.

Lisa Jones is a writer and musician from Glasgow. She has produced a zine on domestic tedium titled ‘Happy Birthday, Glen and Phyllis’, and two collaborative zines with photographer Audrey Bizouerne. She has also contributed vocals and lyrics as a member of the band Dragged Up.

Thursday 10th October: 6:30-8pm

READING GROUP: MINOR KEY

Refusal, Remembrance and Kinship in Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love

What is the relationship between remembering and resistance? What does refusal look like in the everyday? Where are the opportunities to form and maintain kinships in times of multiple protracted crises? Spanning three sessions, we invite you to share your thoughts on kinship, remembrance, and refusal in relation to Houria Bouteldja’s Whites, Jews, and Us. Whether you’re familiar with Bouteldja’s work or are encountering it for the first time, we hope our reading group will open a space for free and open discussions where we can connect with one another, reflect on past and present political realities, and collectively consider the relationship between ‘intimacy’ and political struggle.

You can find a full PDF of the book by following the link in Minor Key’s Instagram bio and copies will be available at Good Press to purchase on the night.

The book group will meet three times:
Refusal -- 10 October
Remembrance -- 24 October
Kinship -- 07 November

Minor Key is an artistic and curatorial collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Emmy Yoneda and curator and Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, Orsod Malik. Taking inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, they critically consider the relationship between ‘intimacy’ and political struggle.