The Infinity Card: LOTE Reading Group

Thu 26 January, Thu 2 , Thu 9 & Thu 16 February

Join us over the course of 5 weeks to read Shola von Reinhold’s exquisite debut novel LOTE.

Each week we’ll read chapters in advance and then come together to discuss and explore the novel further. The weekly sessions will also include contextual materials including music, art, film and additional texts.

You don’t have to have attended a previous session. If you’ve read the book come along to our final session on Thursday 16 Feb, 6.30pm-8pm, where we’ll be sharing and discussing our responses to LOTE.

About LOTE
Solitary Mathilda has long been enamoured with the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 20s, and throughout her life, her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things that she adores, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town Hermia was known to have lived in during the 30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination, but will she be able to break the thrall of her Transfixions? From champagne theft and Black Modernisms, to art sabotage, alchemy and lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cults, Mathilda’s journey through modes of aesthetic expression guides her to truth and the convoluted ways it is made and obscured.

This reading group is open to all; it’s a place to come together, to reflect, to think and to learn, not only from what we’ll be reading but from each other. It’s a space of multiple perspectives, constructive disagreements, mutual respect and care for one another. The reading group will be hosted by Sim Panaser, Visual Art Curator here at Chapter.

Please get in touch with us via email if you need a copy of the book.

Dates

Week 1 - 19 Jan 6.30pm-8pm

Week 2 - 26 Jan 6.30pm-8pm:

Week 3 - 2 Feb 6.30pm-8pm

Week 4 - 9 Feb 6.30pm-8pm

Additional texts to accompany this week available here

Week 5 - 16 Feb 6.30pm-8pm

The book explores reframing and reclaiming history, healing the present and imagining the future, key themes of artist Leo Robinson’s solo exhibition, The Infinity Card, at Chapter Gallery. Leo included LOTE in the reading list he compiled to accompany the exhibition and he also designed the cover artwork for the Canadian edition of the book.

LOTE is the winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, 2022

"A heady novel that explores, in multiple genres and forms—comedy of errors, writing-retreat novel, book within a book—the erasure of Black art from gallery walls, history books, and archives. . . . Von Reinhold’s sensual sentences unfurl like ethereal greenery as you read."

The Paris Review - Hannah Gold

Prices:

Am Ddim | Free