Writing on Raving
Saturday, April 15, 2023 | 8pm doors / 8:30pm readings
Location: The Lab (2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103)
Tickets: $15 (discounted or free for The Lab members)
Click here for recording of event
Cloaca Projects, Slash, and The Lab present Writing on Raving, a NY event series founded in 2021, spearheaded by Zoë Beery, Geoffrey Mak, and Mckenzie Wark. Writing on Raving is a night of readings about nightlife, dancing, techno, about why we love all these things, but also about how that love is complicated. It brings together a diverse range of writers whose dispatches from dance floors, bedrooms, and their own histories hold a mirror to a community whose cultural preservation is still emergent.
Alongside readings from the NY trio, the San Francisco iteration of Writing on Raving will feature readings by San Francisco-based writers Brittany Newell, Anne Lesley Selcer, and Chris Zaldua. Fault Radio will be providing the music background for the evening.
An afterparty for this event, hosted by Club Moniker, will be held at Underground SF. Tickets can be purchased here.
Organized on the occasion of the exhibition through the electric grid promised land, curated by Cloaca Projects (marcella faustini + Charlie Leese) and currently on view at Slash.
Mckenzie Warks’ new book Raving can be purchased locally at Et Al. Books (2831 Mission, San Francisco). You can read more about it in The New Yorker.
Zoë Beery is a journalist and safer spaces worker in Brooklyn. She co-organizes the safer spaces programs at Nowadays, Sustain-Release, Horst Arts & Music, and Tangent Gallery. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Resident Advisor, and many other publications.
Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys, out in 2024. His writing and criticism have appeared in The Guardian, Artforum, and Spike. As a performance artist, he has staged “performative readings” at Swiss Institute, CTM Festival, and Kaje. He is based in NYC.
Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 by Henry Holt and HarperCollins. It was translated into German by btb, a division of Random House, in January 2020 and published as Ein Sommer in Big Sur. From 2017-18 she wrote a regular column on gender and sexuality for Dazed Digital. You can find her written work in Granta, N+1, The New York Times, Joyland and Playgirl. In 2021 she was a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artist grant for artists serving under-represented communities. In addition to writing, she has worked as a professional Dominatrix since 2018. She and her wife Silk Worm run a weekly drag and dance party called Angels at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, one of San Francisco’s oldest queer bars. You can find her on instagram at @frottage_industry.
Anne Lesley Selcer is a poet and artist. They play with moving image, performance and sound. Work has screened or been performed at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, The Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Cork International Film Festival and The Berkeley Art Museum among other places. Writing has been commissioned/published internationally, most recently in Baest: a journal of queer forms. Blank Sign Book is their essay collection on art and politics between Occupy and Trump. Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as winner of the First Poetry Book Prize, is about Beauty. Keywords: anti-self, synesthesia, collaboration, anti-discipline, Girl is Presence. More @end____less____lee.
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Raving (Duke 2023), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte 2020) and Capital is Dead (Verso 2019). With madison moore, she coedited the Black Techno | Queer Rave issue of e-flux journal, December 2022.
Chris Zaldua is a writer, event producer, and DJ based in San Francisco, California. He co-founded two event series, Surface Tension and Vague Terrain, and a record label, Left Hand Path. His writing has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Weekly, KQED, Resident Advisor, FACT Magazine, and beyond.
Fault Radio is a grassroots non-profit organization dedicated to creating a center for modern electronic/dance music culture in the Bay Area. Originally conceived as a pop-up live video-streaming platform of DJ sets and digital archive in 2018, they recently brought the URL to IRL via a physical station and storefront, which opened in July 2022. Fault Radio functions as both a stationary and mobile community hub, bridging the electronic music community on- and offline via live-streams and collaborative pop-up events to document and experience the brilliance of the local music scene.
Club Moniker is a Bay Area collective focused on forward-thinking underground dance music. The collective includes artists and organizers across the club, radio, music production, and design spaces. Club Moniker aims to present experimental rave experiences while promoting safe space values.