In the organizer's words:

Workshop, Reading Group
Angie Stardust Foyer

In English
Free admission

Registration via opencalls.discourse@hkw.de until November 1
The registration deadline has expired.

As part of the reading group L is for the Way You Look at Me

Love, Fear, Entanglement: A Speculative Exploration of Parasitism follows on from previous events in L is for The Way You Look at Me, which explored fermentation and decay, the softening of scientific rationalism and reconceptualizations of love. This final reading group session in the series opens up a discursive space of phantasmagoria - possibly induced by the cumulative microbial intoxication of the previous sessions. Led by speculative fiction author Regina Kanyu Wang, winner of the Xingyun Award and Hugo Award finalist, this reading and writing workshop explores the coexistence and intertwining of speculation and reality, love and fear. Drawing on Daoist philosophy, biological research and microbiology, Wang explores non-binary perspectives that serve as entry points into speculative future scenarios in which the boundaries between symbiosis and parasitism, biosphere and digital sphere are blurred.

Based on three short science fiction stories/essays, including Wang's "A Cyber-Cuscuta Manifesto" (2020), "Blood Child" (1995) by Octavia E. Butler and "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be" (2024) by Scott F. Gilbert, the workshop invites participants on an intersubjective journey of speculative writing in which different forms of cohabitation are imagined and new biological and affective entanglements are created.

With: Regina Kanyu Wang