Welcome to an evening at Mint, dedicated to the writer Hervé Guibert. Three contemporary Swedish writers, critics and translators – Eli Levén, Hanna Johansson and Mathias Westin – take a look at Guibert’s versatile practice. The participants read partly from Guibert’s texts, partly from their own texts that engage with Guibert’s writing, approaching the authorship from different angles and opening it up for interpretation.

In recent years, several books have been published based on the life and work of the French writer, critic, filmmaker and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–1991). In Sweden, his writing has reached a new generation thanks to the reissues of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Blindsight, and his perspective on memory and transience, obsession, illness and sexuality, as well as his distinctive voice – which gives the reader a rare strong illusion of closeness and familiarity – has, since his untimely death in 1991, never ceased to captivate.

The evening takes place in Polys Peslika’s ongoing exhibition Young Predictions at Mint (11.4 – 15.6, 2024) .

The event is free and does not require advance registration. In Swedish.

With:

Eli Levén is the author of the novels Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats and Hur jag skulle vilja försvinna, as well as critic and filmmaker. He has written the foreword to Norstedt’s new edition of Blindsight, 2021.

Hanna Johansson is the author of the novel Antiquity as well as a critic and art editor at SvD. She has written about Hervé Guibert in, among other things, SvD’s Under Strecket (“The art of getting to know a dead stranger”, 2023).

Mathias Westin is a psychologist and translator. Among other things, he is working on a translation of Hervé Guibert’s novel Le protocole compassionnel, 1991.

With: Anne Boyer (US/UK), David Wojnarowicz & Marion Scemama (US), Judith Kiros (SE), Hanna Rajs (SE), Karl Holmqvist (SE/DE), Kim Hyesoon (KR) distantly with Andjeas Ejiksson (SE) & Jennifer Hayashida (US/SE), Shadi Angelina Bazeghi (DK), XTC in the XIV (SE).

Mint Poetry Festival 2024 follows a dramaturgy defined by the ecstatic. In the displaced temporality of illness, through revelation, death, and pleasure, language stretches towards an ‘other’ reality. At the center of the event is human vulnerability and rapture, conveyed through reading, song, and film.

The Poetry Festival is produced by the artists Andjeas Ejiksson and Iris Smeds and Mint’s curator Emily Fahlén, as part of The Isolated Bone, a project that touches on a collective concept of truth that is being put out of play. Through a disintegration of public and private, via the spectacle of the family and the rule of law, ideas of a shared reality versus testimony – along with a precarious sense of not being believed – are negotiated.

Mint Poetry Festival is organized in collaboration with ABF Stockholm and with support from the Swedish Arts Council.

This is an invitation to participate in the performance The People’s Family Court by Iris Smeds. The performance is organised as part of Mint’s ongoing exhibition The Isolated Bone. Please find the mandatory sign up form below!

On Saturday, 17 February at 1–4 pm, The People’s Family Court will be held in Katasalen in ABF-huset (floor 1). Four people stand accused: Mom, Dad, Child and Dog. On stage are the four family members, and in the audience are the people holding them to account. 

During the performance – which is also a filming of a scene for Smeds’ upcoming film “The Little House in the Food Court” – the audience will make accusations against the family members. These are formulated and submitted in advance in the form below. The accused character can be acquitted or convicted, the penalty for a conviction being exclusion from the family. 

The People’s Family Court runs for a total of three hours, from 13-16, including replays. 

Instructions for you as an audience / extra

You book your seat by writing an accusation to a family member using the online form below. You will not read out your allegations yourself. It is important that you address your accusation in a maximum of 250 characters to ONE family member; Mum, Dad, Child or Dog. You can accuse your own mother, father, child or dog, or the symbol of the mother, father, child or dog,

As a spectator and extra, you will take part in the event and will be filmed at the same time. As the whole scene is documented, it is important that you can stay from the beginning to the end. 

SIGN UP HERE

Since 2020, Iris Smeds has been working on the film project The Little House in the Food Court, whose story consists of a queer theatre group that in an undefined future settles in a mall’s food court and stages an adaptation of Laura Ingalls’ book series The Little House on The Prairie as a play. The theatre group creates scenes that confront and renegotiate different roles and power structures within a family, where the concept of family also serves as an allegory for the state. Scene 5 is currently on display in Mint’s exhibition The Isolated Bone.