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Listen to online readings each week

Illustration by Kylah Benes-Trapp. Virtual installation designed with web developer support from visual artist Alaa Alsaraji.

During a time of many social, political and environmental apocalypses, could we read enough to shape a new future? The Apocalypse Reading Room is an on-site library curated by Ama Josephine Budge: a world of talking stories in the face of environmental and social collapse, a gathering of all the books we might need to change the end of the world…

In summer 2020, The Apocalypse Reading Room: Room2Room goes digital and you can listen to readings online each week on a newly curated Apocalypse Reading Room webpage. Selected guests are invited to read a section of their apocalypse survival guide from their favourite reading rooms: nooks, living rooms, bedrooms, attics, garages, closets, stairwells and basements.

Watch the readings
The website is best viewed on a desktop.

Week one: Nii Obodai reads A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Week two: Victoria Sin reads The Inner Chapters by Chuang Tzŭ

Week three: Pratibha Parmar reads Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Week four: Kai-Isaiah Jamal reads Surge by Jay Bernard

Week five: Ama Josephine Budge reads In Nearby Bushes by Kei Miller

Week six: Theodora Omambala reads The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Resources for reading groups
There is an engagement guide for Room2Room and each reading is accompanied by questions or provocations for reading groups which you can download from The Apocalypse Reading Room website. We invite you to read these texts and share your thoughts via social media: @artsadm on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #ApocalypseReadingRoom.

About Ama Josephine Budge
Ama is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities.

You can explore the physical reading room in person at Toynbee Studios in early 2021, produced and supported by Artsadmin, and part of Season for Change, a national programme celebrating the environment and inspiring climate action in partnership with Julie’s Bicycle. This project is supported by BE PART through the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

BE PART logo

The Apocalypse Reading Room was realised in partnership with Free Word for their All The Ways We Can Grow season in 2019. Created with additional support from The Reading Agency, and donations by Housman’s Radical Bookshop, Skin Deep magazine and various publishers including Harper Collins, Hachette Children’s Group and Walker.

The Apocalypse Reading Room: Room2Room is supported by Carcanet Press.

Date and time

28 July – 11 September 2020
Free, online

Please note
This is now a past event.

Venue

Online

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