ACROSS THE WAY WITH

Across The Way With ... is a growing series of informal lectures from, with and about intimacy in the public domain.

With lectures by Hannah Black, Dean Bowen, Fayen D'Evie, Elizabeth Boon, & Sofia Lo Bianco, Dehlia Hannah & Nadim Samman, Jason Hendrik Hansma, Gordon Hall, Çağlar Köseoğlu, Élisabeth Lebovici, Sonya Lindfors, Raqs Media Collective, Sarah Rifky, Matthew Stadler, Isabelle Sully, Eloise Sweetman, Abdullah Qureshi and others to follow.

A new lecture appears every Monday http://shimmershimmer.org/across-the-way-with

Lauren Berlant describes in her essay Intimacy: A Special Issue how everyone thinks they know how to use intimacy. Nevertheless, intimacy is something that is easily misinterpreted. Intimacy is disturbing, fleeting, and challenging to discuss, especially and especially in its execution.

Shimmer and PUBLICS explore the dark side of intimacy by welcoming the words of artists, poets, philosophers, curators and others from around the world. An exploration where we bring our guests and the public together, through intimacy, at a time when racism, war and greed are invading our lives and when public intimacy has become a political act of openness. We want to challenge intimacy and look beyond the conventional understanding of intimacy as 'only' the 'personal'. Instead, the program sees intimacy as a medium for rethinking the sense of community and the care that 'we' as modern people hold for each other in a digitized society.

This program reflects on the texture in a voice, the rhythm of a body, the poetic and artistic forms of the written word and how these forms of intimacy could get a public voice. Together we create a space that is both public and intimate, digital and analog, with distance and proximity. We choose to create an online platform to support reading to others and others. For the public, it is the intimate experience of being read; the experience of the intimate texture of the voice, the rhythm of the breathing and the digitized voice flowing towards you. In this way, instead of creating a 'reading group' for discussion, we create a space for the phone in the pocket that is heard at work, in the kitchen, or the laptop that is taken to bed.

Across The Way With ... is a source, a place to think, to work out the possibilities of accessibility. A place that extends beyond our networks and walls.