UPCOMING:

Sunday, March 24th

12-2pm

Inhabiting the Library / Habitar la Biblioteca conversation
Join us Sunday, March 24th, at 12:30pm for a conversation with Javiera Barrientos, Bel Olid, and Andrea Reed-Leal surrounding the Latin American collective book Inhabiting the Library (Habitar la Biblioteca) 📖 🪢 🧰 on libraries, intimacies, politics, and archives in war-conflicts.

"Part of this project is to make evident the inter-relationality and economics of knowledge exchange via the library—in our homes, with friends and institutions, we continually circulate knowledge. It is not only in the public library where we find and acquire books, it is also, and above all, from personal collections that collective networks are created. A tribute *to* books and the written word, the project recognizes libraries as emotional, creative, vulnerable, open and sites constantly in flux.” 🌀

📕 Javiera Barrientos is a book historian and bookbinder. She investigates the intersections between material culture, literary genres, and practices of colonial and postcolonial extractivism and bibliographic exchange. She is co-writer of Inhabiting the Library. @notasdearte

📗 Bel Olid is a language and Literature professor at the University of Chicago, they have also been very active as a translator of Catalan and, to a lesser extent, of Spanish, mainly of feminist literature and children's books. @bel_olid

📘 Andrea Reed-Leal is a historian and independent editor. She investigates the history of the book and libraries, female intellectuality, and objects as knowledge. She is the co-editor of Inhabiting the Library. @anreedl
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UPCOMING:

Saturday, March 23rd

6-8pm

Waybill Launch Party
 On Saturday, March 23rd we'll host the launch of Waybill (@waybill.zip), a journal on global logistics, trade, supply chains, and their mediatization 🛰️ 📡 🚢 Contributions to the first volume include the history of the shipping container as technology, a zine of shredded trucking magazines, the life of a unionized shipping port strategy game, and globalization and colonization through the lens of a Central American seaport, among many others...⁠

🌊 ⚓️ Join us for a brief presentation from the editors, along with drinks, conversation, and an opportunity to get up your copy of Waybill⁠

🚚 📦️ Doors open at 6pm, with talks beginning at 6:30pm
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, March 2nd

5:30-8pm

Lisa Lapinski’s Miss Swiss
Join us in hosting the Chicago stop for artist Lisa Lapinski’s book tour 🛤️ for her recent monograph Miss Swiss 🏁 published by @inventorypress. 🛖Doors Open at 5:30 for drinks🧃and browsing 👀, with reading/conversation alongside artists Catherine Sullivan and Eli Greene at 6PM 🕕🗣️. More details below:

Lisa Lapinski: Miss Swiss is artist Lisa Lapinski’s most comprehensive monograph to date. Lisa Lapinski is an artist living and working in Houston, Texas.

Published on the occasion of Drunk Hawking, her 2020 mid-career survey at Visual Arts Center (VAC) at the University of Texas at Austin, the book will include never before published images of Lapinski’s exhibitions and artworks from 2000 to the present. Miss Swiss features contributions by Bruce Hainley, Graham Bader, Kyle Dancewicz, Sabrina Tarasoff, and MacKenzie Stevens, as well as a conversation between the artist and linguist Viola Schmitt. Designed by artists Laura Owens and Asha Schechter of Apogee Graphics, the book is an inventive collaboration between Owens, Schechter, and Lapinski, providing new insights into Lapinski’s influential and idiosyncratic practice.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, February 25th

6-8pm

NO SHELTER video series and discussion

Join us Sunday, February 25th for NO SHELTER, a video series exposing new forms of migrant detention being concocted by collaborations between the state and the non-profit industrial complex. Made by a semi-anonymous collective of filmmakers, activists, survivors, and whistleblowers in Chicago, these films address the detention of migrant children in facilities run by Heartland Alliance, the inhumane warehousing of Venezuelan migrants by the Brandon Johnson administration, and the related manufactured public housing “crisis.” The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmakers and activists from several organizations and autonomous projects present

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PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, February 18th

2-4pm

Honoring Palestinian Martyrs: Art Build and Screening
Join us this Sunday at 2PM for the event “Honoring Palestinian Martyrs: Art Build and Screening.” Hosted at Inga in collaboration with Debbie Patino (@arte_curandero) Roshni Bano, and Jackie Guataquira (@jackiegeee), the afternoon will be comprised of a screening of Jumana Manna’s documentary Foragers (2022) and a tissue cempasúchil flower making workshop. Eventbrite link in bio with more information as well as a donation page for medical workers in Palestine. ⛑️🌸

🧃Light snacks and drinks will be provided, masks are required 😷—some will be available on site. Due to the smaller space, there is a limited amount of spots, and an RSVP is needed. We look forward to gathering for this time of art-making, film watching, and community building, while centering those in Gaza. Free Palestine!
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, February 17th

5:30-7:30pm

Reading and conversation with Raquel Gutiérrez and Sandra Ruiz
Join us Saturday, February 17th, when we'll be accompanied by Raquel Gutiérrez and Sandra Ruiz, both reading and in conversation with each other surrounding their recent and forthcoming books (Gutiérrez: Brown Neon, Ruiz: Left Turns in Brown Study, Ricanness) on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, minoritarian literary aesthetics, study as an emancipatory practice, and m🌀re!
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, January 13th

4-6pm

Land.Place.Belonging. book launch + conversation
Join us for the book launch of + a conversation (with Nance Klehm, Anjulie Rao and Lydia Cheshewalla) surrounding issue #1 of Land.Place.Belonging. 📚🌱 a collection of conversations with Nance Klehm of Social Ecologies with:

Journalist and critic Anjulie Rao calls for equitable stewardship of urban spaces, MarkMcIntyre speaks on New York City’s Clean Soil Bank, soil scientist S. Perl Egendorf champions creating technosoils for urban landscapes, Cornell extension agent and composter Kwesi Joseph sings the praises of soil mineralization, poet Timothy Otto tells a tale of repairing relationship with both contaminated land and his father and biogeochemist Johannes Lehmann shares his long history working with biochar.

✏️🌿 With ink illustrations by Julie Wu 🍪☕️ and sweet treats by Alma Lindgren (@almalindg) 🖨 Produced by Social Ecologies (@socialecologies)
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PREVIOUSLY:

Wednesday, December 6th

7-8:30pm

🍉 The Gaza Monologues of Ashtar Theatre: collective reading
In response to Ashtar Theatre’s request to collectively read The Monologues of Gaza in different settings around the world, we have organized this gathering as a way to show solidarity with Palestine here in Chicago. This event will take place on Dec. 6th at Inga, 7 pm. If you wish to read one of the monologues please go to the link in our stories (which we'll be repeatedly posting over the next few days).

🇵🇸 "The Gaza Monologues are testimonies written by ASHTAR youth in 2010, after the first war on the Gaza Strip. Tragically, these Monologues are still accurate today. They are highlighting the horrors, hopes and resilience of the courageous Gazans to a wider audience, bringing out the voices of children and people in Gaza." –@ashtartheatre

Thanks to @ercaba_ and @leticiapardo_ for organization/coordination
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PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, November 12th

4–6pm

Track changes book launch with n+1 and Paper Monument
Join us on Sunday, November 12th at 4pm as we host n+1 (@nplusonemag) and Paper Monument (@paper.monument) for the Chicago launch of their recently released Track changes: a handbook for art criticism 📙🔡, edited by Mira Dayal (@miradayal) and Josephine Heston (@jvheston), in addition to a pop-up selection of the imprint's numerous publications (and hats)! 💭 Dushko Petrovich, co-founder of Paper Monument and Mira Dayal, artist, writer, and editor, will be reading and in conversation surrounding the book.

🧰 🔀 In Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, twenty-five art writers and editors share strategies for critical writing and editing that encourage solidarity and reparative decision-making to actively challenge structural inequalities within the art world. The book offers transparency into the editorial process and serves as a supportive guide to art criticism. It includes contributions by Kemi Adeyemi, Andy Campbell, Erica Cardwell, Re’al Christian, Aruna D’Souza, Leslie Dick, Amy Fung, Merray Gerges, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Ariel Goldberg, Yves Jeffcoat, Dana Kopel, Yaniya Lee, Dessane Lopez Cassell, Jessica Lynne, Tausif Noor, Ashley Stull Meyers, Lindsay Preston Zappas, Kristina Kay Robinson, Jillian Steinhauer, Ana Tuazon, Monica Uszerowicz, Wendy Vogel, Emily Watlington, and Elisa Wouk Almino.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, October 28th

7–10pm

Son of Ingagi (1940) screening
Saturday, October 28th from 7-10pm (after shop hours), join us in hosting longtime Inga friends and programmers A.J. McClenon and Isra Rene for a spooky season screening of Son of Ingagi (1940) 🎥 by Richard C. Kahn with a screenplay by Spencer Wiliams Jr.

🚪Doors will open at 7 pm for light snacks, with the screening starting around 7:30 (Run time: 1hr 2 min) and a post-screening discussion aiming to address one of the central questions at hand in the film: What are the origins of Monstrosity? A reader of the material, the film, and Black Horror put together by A.J. and Isra will also be available alongside our titles at the shop 💭. The night will close with an accompanying playlist for the occasion.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, October 21st

6–8pm

Book launch (with poetry reading) of Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum
Join us! 📚 this Saturday (October 21st), at 6pm, for the launch (with poetry reading) of Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum, published by @metatronpress 🌀🔭 @ivanna.jpg will be joined by Izzy Boutiette (@isabelka______ ) for a chat/Q&A

🪐🗝🧰 Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp utterance. Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across elastic thresholds of past, present, and future. When “every rational option” tries and fails, Baranova challenges us to embrace irrational options. Lovingly dialogic, this collection bears witness to ongoing destruction and renewal, offering transformational visions of the future that refuse neat resolution. Baranova enjoins us to will these futures a reality. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.

🧵 Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist from the Pacific Northwest living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Confirmation Bias (Metatron Press, 2019) and Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Tuesday, October 3rd

7–9pm

Organizing in El Salvador & Guatemala—A firsthand report

🇬🇹🪢🇸🇻 join us for reports from recent delegations to Guatemala and El Salvador, covering popular social movements and resistance to electoral fraud, land dispossesion and ecological destruction, and right wing authoritarian power consolidation, with @cispes_solidarity @crln_la @nisgua_solidaridad (plus snacks!)

🇬🇹🪢🇸🇻 acompañanos para escuchar informes de delegaciones recién vueltos de Guatemala y El Salvador, quienes cubrirán los movimientos sociales populares y la resistencia al fraude electoral, el despojo de tierras y la destrucción ecológica, y la consolidación del poder autoritario de derecha, con @cispes_solidarity @crln_la @nisgua_solidaridad (y con refrigerio!)

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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, September 30th

7–9pm

Limn the Distance book launch
🌸⛰ To mark the launch of Limn the Distance, Rose will be at Inga Books reading alongside friend, writer and artist Lee Rae Walsh, bringing their individual poetics into a call and response on the themes of farming, collectivity, living and practice.

📙 Limn the Distance imagines decentralisation through personal narrative and the concentric communities of one mountain—from the radical sectarian shakers and experiments in communitarian living and small-scale farming that followed in their wake, to the life and legacy of poet Bernadette Mayer who lived nearby. Rose seeks movement away from rather than apart from major cities and art worlds, godheads and normative bodies as affirmative knowledge and value systems. Co-opting the essay, Limn the Distances uses poetics, autobiography and the fragmentary mode as a proposition for communitarian and decentralised practice in art-making and poetry.

🌾 Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer and critic whose work is held in the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College and has been published widely, including by LA Review of Books, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, The White Review, Art Monthly, X-Tra, Bricks from the Kiln, Apollo, MAP Magazine and Worms. She has written several chapbooks and Limn the Distance is her first book, published this month by JOAN (@publishingjoan)

🌀 lee rae walsh is an artist-poet-photographer-teacher–researcher-facilitator-and-friend. They most recently organized Slowly and Surely with an Eternal Wing, an ongoing series bringing together artists, poets, lecturers and performers who use the stage as a place to truly, & messily practice. Their work is sundrenched and blurry, and happens in the hours of each little day.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, September 3rd

1–7pm (then until 🌅)

Inga turns four!
✌️ Inga turns four! ✌️ Join us in H.A.G.S. (Had A Great Summer 🏁) festivities to celebrate 4️⃣ years of books, programming, and our wonderful reader-ship ⛴ on Sunday, September 3rd! 🌱 We will be open for book browsing from 1pm 📚👀 with tunes 🔊, cake cutting 🎂🌸, veggie skewer grilling 🍢, and refreshments 🧉 from 4pm until sunset 🌇 We’ll be launching some handmade ceramic and cyanotype bookmarks to commemorate our 4-year anniversary—come thru!🏺🌡️❤️‍🔥
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, August 12th

2–6pm

New Documents Popup
🆕 💼
New Documents
Los Angeles

(loves) ♻️

🌱 📚
Inga Books
Chicago

We're open from 1–7pm, and from 2–6pm are excited to host a @newdocuments pop up, with Jeff direct from sunny LA, with a myriad collection of new books from the art book publisher including titles from Raven Chacon, Lucy Lippard, Pope.L, and Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer's Infinite Library, among many, many others. 🌀🧩 🌞 We'll also have a scent to read by—sandalwood incense for the taking.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Friday, July 28th

7pm

How To Treat a Body: Disability Reframed
Friday, July 28th at 7pm join us in hosting the film program How To Treat a Body: Disability Reframed in collaboration with 6018|North. Programmed by Ana García Jácome and Caroline K. Ng, the program will consist of shorts diving into the experiences of disabled people around the medical institution and beyond and will be followed by a conversation with Sky Cubacub and Ana García Jácome.

Film Program:
Emily Beaney (UK), Deviant, 2021
Ana García Jácome (MX), Malitas, 2022
Trini Ibarra (MX), He sido muchas, 2021
Nur Matta (MX), Maldita lisiada, 2021
Radical Visibility Collective (US), Access Bitch, 2018
Marrok Sedgwick (US), People Like Me, 2019

😷 Masks required. This project is supported by 6018|North as part of the ongoing project Justice Hotel.
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PREVIOUSLY:

Friday, May 19th

7pm

Namkheun Collective (น้ำขึ้น: “rising tides” 🌊)
Join us this Friday evening (May 19th) at 7pm for a talk and informal discussion with Namkheun Collective @namkhen (น้ำขึ้น: “rising tides” 🌊), a textual collective based in Bangkok, Thailand, publishing and translating 🧰 🧨 around proposed modes of resistance, conversations and resonances across geographies, memes, and unfulfilled dreams. As many in recent protests in Thailand chanted: No God, No King, Only Fans, how will the electrifying election results yesterday destabilize the ‘Father’ complex instilled by the monarchy?

Some of the collective's output 📖 will be available for browsing—refreshments too 🧃🧉
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PREVIOUSLY:

Saturday, April 15th

5pm

Bosque de Cantares: Murmullos Mexicanos book launch
On Saturday, April 15th at 5pm, Inga will host Guillermo Garcia Pérez, author of recently released Bosque de Cantares: Murmullos Mexicanos (published by Gato Negro), for a book launch and discussion with Isaac Vasquez. The event will move between English and Spanish.

“Bosque de Cantares is a formless entity that threatens to unravel excessively codified historical episodes and, therefore, to allow new secret passages in time. Jumping freely between epochs and events (from the Tlaxcala Child Martyrs of 1527 to the Tzeltales of the twenty-first century, passing through Ignacio Castera's late seventeenth century urban conception or John Kenneth Turner's post-revolutionary Mexico), this series of fragmentary essays seeks to move the roles of Mexican anthropology, history, and literature, because it understands that only from that movement these roles can be repoliticized and serve as a toolbox.”
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PREVIOUSLY:

Friday, April 14th

6pm

Joy James's In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love book talk
Next Friday, April 14th at 6pm, we're excited to host Joy James in conversation with Dr. rosalind hampton and Dr. Charles H.F. Davis III, surrounding James's recently published book In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities 🧰

📖 Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal
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PREVIOUSLY:

Friday, June 24th

7–9pm

How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself (Reading/Performance)

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-shall-thou-resolve-thyself-presented-by-inga-tickets-354702092507

 

The Chicago premiere of new performance arranged for print by Matty Davis, featuring seven Chicago performers, artists, and friends.

 

Presented by Inga, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will premiere in Chicago with cast of seven Chicago-based artists, performers, and educators: Bryan Saner, Katharine Schutta, Amira Hegazy, Thomas Huston, Luke Joyner, Sungjae Lee, and Anders Zanichkowsky. This occasion marks the first time that the work is presented by performers who themselves are not in the publication, offering a unique exploration of empathy that's motored by language, voice, and personal experience.

 

Admission to the event is free, but attendees may choose to make a donation - all donations go to the performers. While walk-ups and passersby are welcome, RSVP is strongly encouraged, as the work is spatially sensitive and it is important to know how many attendees are expected. A limited number of editions of How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will be available for purchase at Inga.

 

More specifically, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself is a performance arranged for print that uses choreography, writing, photography, and design to trace the inner and outer contours of five people under pressure. Each person appears upon the same slab of concrete at different points in time. All engage a single gesture, including its approach and its undoing. Time is scarce, bodies pry. Meditations on gender, determination, solitude, and pain build and seep from within an exacting loop of structure and sensation.

 

How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was conceived by Matty Davis and arranged for print by Matt Wolff and Nilas Andersen. It was performed by Holly Sass, Matty Davis, Matt Shalzi, Nile Harris, and Bobbi Jene Smith, with photographs by Jonah Rosenberg.

 

Following Knee Balance, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself marks the second work in a series of performances by Matty Davis that are arranged for print by Matt Wolff. Distinct in content and form, and featuring contributions from artists of various disciplines, each work weaves together spatial, temporal, and empathic possibilities unique to performance and printed matter. How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself was published in an edition of 150 and bound using fragments of clothes worn by the performers.

 

Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer whose work uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy to locate and expand relationships to the self, other people, land, and histories. Unique and multi-faceted, each of these relationships, i.e., projects, is part of a broader orbit around perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. Davis was born in Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed. He grew-up as a multi-sport athlete, which exposed him to visceral experiences of surface, injury, resilience, cooperation, and play that continue to influence his interdisciplinary work. Spanning sculpture, drawing, photography, and books, his projects predominantly manifest in performance and dance, which he values as shared space in which to be transformatively alive. His performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death.” For more information, please visit www.mattydavis.net

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