My Little Enlightenment

A Lecture Performance

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My Little Enlightenment is a lecture performance on eighteenth-century philosophers in dressing gowns, formal difficulty, inclusion and hospitality, queer utopia,

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female salonnieres, paper tigers, obscurity, the chromatic buzz of what’s knowable, Denis Diderot, Jean Cocteau, Gertrud Stein, star-gazing,

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Karl Marx as astrologer, poetry and bugs under the microscope, rewritten histories, alternative encyclopaedias, ornament, cartouches and other fricative frames.

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First presented inside an absurd salon full of paper lampshades, coloured lightbulbs, projections, and miniature theatre sets, this is both the document of a past lecture performance and a script or score for future iterations but it’s also a text in its own right that works on and with the page.

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It’s part of Sophie Seita’s three-year project of what she has called translational tête-à-tête with Enlightenment thinkers, writers, and (pseudo-)scientists; a project that took a sideways look at the Enlightenment period through a queer-feminist lens, asking what its ideals of liberty, knowledge, progress, and tolerance mean today. What emerged from these imaginary conversations with Enlightenment figures were a series of performances, videos, collaborations, and most recently a solo exhibition at [ SPACE ] in London.

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6.8 x 11 inches
44 pages
black, green, and red offset, Kopa
edition of 300
2019