Thursday, June 4, 2020
7:00pm
Looking for something new to read? Need a break from the screens?
Rewriting the Wild is an ongoing project by Toronto-based artist Amanda White, in which a series of novels featuring 'man-vs-nature' conflict narratives are edited to have female protagonists. FCG is hosting a Reading Group around the novel The Old Woman and The Sea, adapted from The Old Man and The Sea originally written by American author Ernest Hemingway and published in 1952. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 the original novel has become one of the classic novels of its genre in western literature.
As an artistic experiment, White's project is concerned with generating discussion and debate; will this slight but important shift change the story's human-nature narrative in interesting ways? Will it generate new themes, metaphors, and meanings? Rewriting the Wild is both a socially-engaged project that takes the shape of reading groups and book clubs, as well as a series of art objects; as feminist transformations of cultural artifacts.
Forest City Gallery is facilitating an online Reading Group hosted by the artist on June 4th, 2020 which will offer a shared online space to collectively discuss the newly edited novel.
Registration will be open until May 14th. Participation is free and a copy of The Old Woman and The Sea will be mailed to you. Please complete the registration form here.
For more information about the project please visit https://amandawhite.com/the-call-of-the-wild
Excerpt: “She was an old woman who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and she had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a girl had been with her. But after forty days without a fish the girl’s parents had told her that the old woman was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the girl had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the girl sad to see the old woman come in each day with her skiff empty and she always went down to help her carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.”