MRes student, Loulou Siem has devised the following event with a number of other RCA alumni; Adriana Jaroslavsky, Nuria López Blanco and Ana María Chamucero, as part of their current exhibition How to Avoid Being Wrapped.
How to Avoid Writing a Narrative Novel
Friday April 10, 6-8.30pm
Krupa Gallery, 1 Pakenham Street, Clerkenwell, WC1X OLA
The artists have invited Sean Ashton to read from his novel Massive Massive Oil Slick (Ma Bibliothèque, 2025), composed entirely of sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose and avoid. Described by critic Michael Hampton as ‘an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow’, Massive Massive Oil Slick is the second of three novels written to constraints (Living in a Land and the forthcoming A Village of Uncles).
Ashton will be in conversation with writer and translator Anna Aslanyan, author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History (Profile, 2021) and several articles on literary constraints, including the Oulipo group and Georges Perec. Join us for readings and insights from the artists, whose current show is the first of several projects that will use ‘avoidance’ as a curatorial conceit.
