POETRY PERFORMANCE by A.C. Hello, Contemporary Performer, Artist and Poet
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
POETRY PERFORMANCE by A.C. Hello, Contemporary Performer, Artist and Poet, 16 MAY 2025, 6.30pm, Birkbeck (Keynes Library) with a lecture by contemporary French poetry specialist, Dr Mathieu Farizier.
Description of A.C. Hello's work:
“What is at stake in A.C. Hello’s performed readings is a struggle between what belongs to literature (the written text, worked to provide the reader with a « definitive » textual object) and what could be called a « suffocated » speech (a speech which would stop at the edge of the brain and lips, as if it were smothered, snatched up by its own holes). A struggle to live, that will never win and never fail, and whose territory is the body. An occupied territory whose boundaries are porous and from which words and breaths escape by successive overflows. The body is in a trance, only there to embody this poetics of Being in the World.” (A.C. Hello)
A.C. Hello is a poet, artist and performer. She has recently published Koma Kapital (Presses du réel) and Naissance de la gueule, La Peau de l’eau (Pariah), Paradis remis à neuf (éd. Fissile), performs with musicians (L’Armée noire, Animal Fièvre, Le cas très inquiétant de ton cri) and often collaborates with other artists and poets (Chambre Froide). She created and edits the FRAPPA review.
Excerpt:
“Sinistre en pays d’occupant je roule abrutie comme une grosse larme, ma grosse langue sortie, chaussée de mes gros pieds, mes gros bras pendent le long de ma grosse tête. Sinistre en pays d’occupant, je nage au milieu des gens coupés en rondelles, hoquets pantelants, tout entiers empoignés dans des choses qui tournent mal, et toc les coquilles éclatent après tellement de fois s’être demandé possible si c’était que ça éclate, en scrutant la grosse chose dure courir sous leurs peaux, sous leurs yeux, dans leurs fronts […. Aurai-je une joue gélatineuse sucée par les hortensias sur laquelle des chiards pisseront.”
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Dr Mathieu Farizier, "Reading A.C. Hello’s poetry and living my life under capital. A reader’s testimony of a terroristic aggression"
My research examines the works of contemporary French poets and poses a blunt and naive question: what are the forms that may be said to ‘undermine’ capital, in one way or other, through the effects that they have on their readers? In this talk, I will focus on A.C. Hello’s collection Koma Kapital (2021) to highlight the distortions that her practice induces in her readers’ affective, corporeal and intellectual relations to living a life under capital. I will argue that the political effect of AC Hello’s texts is tantamount to a terroristic aggression. Beyond the imperialist uses of “terrorism” as the ultimate de-humanising category, the actual range of this word is not necessarily pejorative (Rapoport: 2002). It designates a set of offensive techniques through which dominated groups resist forces which they consider oppressive, especially when these forces are asymmetrically superior to them. My point is that Koma Kapital effectively works like a political trap, one “induc[ing terror and psychic fear” (Bocksette: 2009), but that we can only see it for what it does once we have fallen into it. I call this process “destructive re-familiarisation”, a variation on Shklovsky’s notion (1917) which suggests that the politics of AC Hello’s poetry lies in its anti-therapeutic properties (Gefen: 2017). The effect of this process, which unfolds sequentially, is that it renders us unable to put up with and normalise our relation to the ordinary world, to living our lives under capital. What happens is that, whereas the book’s incipit prepares its readers for a fictional, slightly surreal narrative, we gradually realise that something else is going on than just reading about a story – one that is objectifiable, external to those who read it. Instead, we gradually come to see this work for what it is through what it does to us: it wages a physical and cognitive attack on our bodies and on our sense of well-being. In order to describe how this pernicious attack unfolds, I will borrow from horror movies analysis, particularly Adam Hart’s argument that what distinguishes the horror genre is its “sensational address”: a direct, physical stimulation of the public. What is most crucial to horror, Hart argues, is that not content to “tell stories about the abject”, it cultivates and relies on “an abject relationship with its viewers”, subjecting them to “sights that make us flinch or grow sick to our stomach” (Hart: 2016). While A.C. Hello’s readers fail to objectify the text’s subject-matter, as they feel increasingly involved in its abject downpour of lifelike trash or peri-human flesh (“mâché comme un oiseau, l’existence maussade du boeuf gazouille dans nos ventres”), the odd thing is that the exuberantly gruesome quality of its language seems less and less outlandish and increasingly relatable. As we gradually piece together the hints that inform the narrator’s existence, it becomes easier and easier for us to fill the book’s narrative defects with our intimate world-knowledge: a pathologically exploitative workplace, “EST-CE QUE TU POUVEZ CHRONOMÉTRER LE TEMPS QUE PASSE SIMON AUX TOILETTES?”; the “réalité brute” of shareholder primacy, “celle des rapports de force” (Hüet: 2021); the range of psychoses of wage labour and antisocial social relations, “je me synchronise à l’anéantissement collectif”, “je ne suis rien, [… mon corps est assiégé”; the hostile streets of cities, “Un énorme slogan publicitaire me barra la route”; ordinary features of value extraction, “Les colons sont revenus. [… Il n’y aura bientôt plus rien à manger ici”, etc. This, it turns out, is the real horror-show which, despite our need to ignore and to normalise it, the book traps us into re-experiencing as horror. The effect of A.C. Hello’s practice is thus to nauseate and terrorise her readers’ bodies away from their own limits of acceptability, to impede the mechanisms through which they were able to “cope”.
Contact name:
Nathalie Wourm