Anemones: A Simone Weil Project

Description:

Robertson’s research wide rime on troubadour poetry—the first European poets to write in their spoken regional vernacular—yields this experiment in thinking “near and with” philosopher and political activist Simone Weil. Moving between the epistolary, poetry, performance, and scholarly research, Anemones is centred on a new translation of Weil’s 1942 essay “What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of” that elevates the troubadour concept of love to a practice of political resistance rejecting force in all its forms. Robertson dwells on the transhistorical potential of this concept from the violent context in which it emerged to the troubling conditions of the present. Embracing actualised and suppressed histories, the work testifies to words, friendship, and readership as resistance across distances.

The event began with a conversation with Yoon Sook Cha, a Vancouver-based writer, photographer, and scholar of Simone Weil, and was followed by a performative reading by Robertson of her translations of three texts by troubadour poet Bernart de Ventadorn.

A livestream of the event was made available on Vimeo. 

Presented in partnership with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.