ACROSS THE WAY WITH… is an expanding series of informal readings of, with, and about intimacy as public event with Élisabeth Lebovici, Fayen d’Evie, Gordon Hall, Raqs Media Collective, Isabelle Sully, Matthew Stadler, Sarah Rifky, Eloise Sweetman, Abdullah Qureshi, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Niko Hallikainen, Çağlar Köseoğlu, Alireza Abbasy, Alaa Abu Asad & Ulufer Çelik, Adelaide Bannerman, Dagmar Bosma.

Conceptualized and organized by Shimmer, ACROSS THE WAY WITH…  is part of PUBLICS ongoing Parahosting program, where PUBLICS supports the realization of projects by others and is an exploratory workspace for their curatorial initiatives in cooperation with PUBLICS. Parahosting is a practice of listening and taking care of paraguests, para-sites, and para-institutions.

Lauren Berlant’s essay Intimacy: A Special Issue shows us that everyone thinks they know how to do intimacy. Still, it is something that is quickly misinterpreted. Intimacy is troubling, fleeting, and challenging to speak about— and more especially to enact. Shimmer and PUBLICS explore intimacy’s obscurity by welcoming words of artists, poets, philosophers, curators, and others around the world. To bring our guests and audience together through the subject of intimacy in a time where racism, war, and greed infiltrates our lives, public intimacy becomes a political act of openness. We intend to challenge intimacy and go beyond the conventional understanding of intimacy as ‘only’ the ‘personal’. Instead, the program considers intimacy as a means to re-think community and how ‘we’ modern humans in a digitized society engage in the care of one another.

In this program, we are thinking about the texture of the voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic forms of writing and how these forms of intimacy can be ‘voiced’ publically. Together, we will create a space that is both public and intimate, digital and analogue, distant and in proximity. We choose to create an online platform as a support for the act of reading aloud for others and with others.For the audience, it is the intimate act of being read to, to experience the intimate texture of the voice, the rhythm of breathing, the digitized voice streaming to you. In this way, rather than creating a ‘reading group’ for discussion, we create a space for the phone in the pocket heard at work, in the kitchen, or the laptop taken to bed. ACROSS THE WAY WITH… is a resource, a place available to contemplate, to flesh out the possibilities of access, a site that goes beyond our networks, and walls.

ACROSS THE WAY WITH… is supported by The Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes’ Together Alone project, Creative Industries Fund NL, and Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam.