This evening of readings and screenings wants to explore the challenges of transforming, adapting, and modifying text in relation to other media such as films, music, and podcasts. Adapting text often involves making specific choices to give the work another experiential quality. Narrative, storytelling, seriality, and other experimental adaptive solutions emerge from this creative moment.

Together with writers, directors, and musicians, we will experience their work through readings and screenings and discuss the necessary negotiations that were used to transform textual elements into something else. The form and function of textual adaptation is constantly evolving; the interconnectedness of media will direct the discussion toward thinking about adaptation as product and process.

Participants include writers Katie Kitamura (2024 Fellow), Claudia Durastanti (2015 Italian Fellow), and Chiara Barzini; directors William Oldroyd and Alexandra de la Mora; and composers Baldwin Giang (2024 Fellow) and Kate Soper (2024 Fellow).

The event will be held in English.

Spazio Supernova is a site-specific three-year art experiment, exhibition, and cultural space located in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. It will burn brightly for three years and then explode and disappear, hopefully leaving behind something new.

Program

6:00–6:05pm
Introduction by Ilaria Puri Purini

Words to Listen

6:05–6:15pm
Claudia Durastanti reading

6:15–6:30pm
Kate Soper will show Unwritten Operas, a screening of readings from Virginia Wolf’s Orlando and David Markson’s Wittgenstein Mistress

6:30–6:50pm
Listening to I carry, a new work for experimental voice, instruments, and electronics with music by Baldwin Giang and words by Katie Kitamura. The work was premiered in early May in New York by the virtuosic ensemble Loadbang

6:50–7:30pm
Conversation with Katie Kitamura and Baldwin Giang, moderated by Claudia Durastanti

7:30–7:45pm
Break

Words for Films

7:45–8:00pm
Reading by Chiara Barzini

8:00–8:05pm
Sequence of Dante y Soledad, directed by Alexandra de la Mora

8:05–8:10pm
Sequence of Eileen, directed by William Oldroyd

8:10–9:00pm
Transforming Text into Screen
Discussing the adaptation of The Marriage of the Red Fish by Guadalupe Nettel into Dante y Soledad, and the adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s book Eileen with directors William Oldroyd and Alexandra de la Mora, moderated by Chiara Barzini