Engages,

Michael Bojkowski, Erin Crouch, Georgie Flood, H.A. Halpert, Ruth Höflich, Christiane Huber, Olivia Koh, Hen Vaughan, Pip Wallis, Briony Galligan SAFE: Rearranging the Library Publication Launch

Dates: Saturday 26 March, 2pm

Please join us on Saturday 26 March at 2pm for the launch of ‘SAFE: Rearranging the Library’ with a discussion between Michael Bojkowski, Erin Crouch, Georgie Flood, Ruth Höflich, Olivia Koh, Briony Galligan and Pip Wallis. They will introduce the publication and discuss the process of making it.

This publication documents a period of collective reading in relation to Todd Haynes’ 1995 film SAFE. Throughout 2020 and 2021, ten group members from Australia, Germany and the United States met regularly via video to read, watch, discuss and share written, filmic, and spoken responses with each other. These contributions, in the form of scripts, essays, drawings, poems, film stills, illustrations, and notations, are included here.

The book has been compiled and edited collaboratively, reflecting the fluid discursive process
and overlapping subject matter. The reading and viewing list of works studied by the group is included as an appendix. These films and texts served as subjects for reflections, critiques and dérives.

Set in the late 1980s within affluent American suburbia, Haynes’ SAFE follows the protagonist Carol as she suddenly becomes acutely unwell with an unidentifiable illness. Carol’s sickness will not yield to analysis or to deconstruction, its mechanics remain invisible, despite objective examination by various authorities. Carol herself won’t yield to such analysis or deconstruction. She cannot be understood, she is opaque; her component parts won’t stop shifting or stay separate long enough to be accounted for. She can’t seem to function as the mechanism she is supposed to be.

In the following script Carol is seen as part of a lineage of multiple other characters and mimetic replays, some of which were named as influences [ by Haynes ] and others who were created in their legacy. Jeanne Dielmann, Guiliana, Mabel, Justine, Mecha.

Presented as part of the Melbourne Art Book Fair.