Thursday, May 8th
7pm
Save the date for: News Night, where 4 journalists have an open-ended conversation around what their latest stories are about and what they are thinking about in the city and globally. Come hungry for a long sandwich.
Thursday, May 8th at 7p.m.
@ Inga (1740 W. 18th Street)
With:
Heather Cherone (WTTW News)
Shannon Heffernan (The Marshall Project)
Keerti Gopal (Inside Climate News)
Jillian Melero (Connect Puerto Rico)
Friday, April 18th
7:30–9pm
Join us for a screening of Hand Eye: A Study of Tricontinental Photomontage (2023, 20 min) by Bryce Wilner, followed by a discussion with the artist and refreshments.
Friday, April 18th
7:30–9pm
In Hand Eye, Wilner examines the use of photography in Tricontinental, the revolutionary political journal founded in 1967 by Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL). Recorded at New York’s Interference Archive, this video essay depicts Wilner’s encounter with the material, provides context for OSPAAAL’s prolific publishing operation, and works toward a theory of the group’s signature method of photomontage.
Thursday, April 3rd
6–8pm
Join us for the release of Land. Place.Belonging. #3 and lively public conversation with provocations from JeeYeun Lee and Muindi Faneuil Muindi.
Land. Place. Belonging. #3 🌀 holds conversations that speak into the technologies of mapping, ritual and storying and their use in remembering and reclaiming both inner and shared territories in these unsettling times.
In L.P.B. issue #3: Philosopher Muindi Faneul Muindi and kinmaker Hyperion Çacatzin Yvaire lo Saga who share forward the technology of their cosmogram, performer and writer Jee Yeun Lee walks boundaried spaces and unearths forgotten stories through listening, Kanienke haka performer and family counselor, boat builder and Marie Lorenz travels urban waterways solo and with others in boats she has built, policy worker and director of the Fresh Water Lab Rachel Havrelock opens political contested waters through sharing their expansive stories, Lindsay Delaronde shares her practices of Embodied Earth Healing, environmental toxicologist Danielle Stevenson leads us into the complexity of applied ecological remediation of contaminated urban land, social practitioner gil lopez holds the line on public green space and social justice activist and first generation immigrant Liza Go grounds to place through regenerating soil through indigenous practices.
Saturday, February 22nd
6-7:30pm
Join us Saturday, February 22nd at 6pm for a screening of 16mm shorts by experimental filmmaker Amy Halpern (1953-2022) and a reading by Laura Paul from her new book “Film Elegy,” published with Prroblem Press.
Laura Paul’s "Film Elegy" is a document of personal loss and the decline of celluloid with echoes between the space of the book and film form. Framed by Paul’s friendship and apprenticeship with the late filmmaker Amy Halpern, the book speaks to the communities and legacies of screen culture.
For over 50 years as an avant-garde filmmaker, commercial cinematographer, technician, programmer, and educator in Los Angeles, Amy Halpern created a body of work with nearly 40 films with an understanding of "cinema as a medium...equally capable of documenting reality and conjuring magic,” according to Sarah Fensom (Film Comment). Halpern's curious cinematic eye evokes otherworldly possibilities within the everyday. Such an intimate practice of looking at people, animals, trees, objects, places, and gestures--for both filmmaker and spectator--becomes a revelation.
Films Include:
Elixir (2012, 7 min, color, silent)
Invocation (1982, 2 min, color, silent)
Peach Landscape (1973, 4.5 min, color, silent)
Fire Belly (2021, 3 min, color, silent)
Chabrot (2022, 3.5 min, bw, sound)
3-Minute Hells (2012, 14 min, color, sound)
Ma Sewing (2021, 1.5 min, color, silent)
Jane Looking (2020, 2 min, color, silent)
Palm Down (2012, 6 min, color, silent)
Total run time: ~ 45 min
All films projected on 16mm by Ben Creech. Prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
About the author:
"Laura Paul is a writer and artist who has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Comics Journal, and other outlets. Her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts, Other Places Art Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and West Hollywood Book Fair. She earned her B.A. in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named a Mary Gates Scholar in the Arts and Humanities, and her M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA, where she received the Gilbert Cates Fellowship for Artistic and Academic Merit. Her book, Film Elegy, was released in October 2024."
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Additional films from Amy Halpern's singular filmography will be shown in Chicago as part of "Palm Down: The Films of Amy Halpern" series with screenings on Friday, February 21st at the Block Museum and Sunday, February 23rd by Tone Glow programmer Joshua Minsoo Kim at Elastic Arts.
Saturday, November 9th
3:30-5pm
🐚 🎛 The three will be in conversation surrounding and read from/around Ruiz's book, "crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms," including an open dialogue throughout.
"In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms."
Saturday, November 2nd
5:30-7pm
Alejandra will talk about the background of the composers found in the book and play sound examples to make Latin American music history experienceable. 🎛 🌀 ¡Nos vemos!
Friday, November 1st
5:30-7pm
You are welcome to arrive earlier during the open hours, as of 1pm, on Nov. 1st to browse through these publications, have a drink, along with other books at Inga. ☕️ We hope to see you there!
Friday, October 11th
6-9pm
A film screening, discussion, and shared meal which unpacks and revisits histories of alternative art and design education, in and outside schools, across several decades of Chicago history. Featuring works from Chicago Metro School, an autonomous CPS high school “without walls” founded in the 1970s; the Stockyard Institute, a DIY art school and radio station for grassroots community organizing founded in 1995 in the Back of the Yards neighborhood; Street-Level Youth Media, a collective amplifying youth voice, equitable access to new media, and civic awareness; Video Machete, founded in 1994 as a collective of activists, students, and media-based artists running youth media workshops across the city; and Eleanor Boyer & Karen Peugh’s La Maestra (1984), a look at Pilsen’s Maria Luisa Michel Almonte, a flower shop-based community arts and crafts teacher. Including newly-digitized footage, the featured work shows students and teachers (sometimes indistinguishably) asserting what it looks like to practice art and design education in an alternative context, and why taking such pedagogies to the margins of institutionality is meaningful for some and necessary for others. Join us for a conversation and food after the screening alongside the presence of students, teachers, and filmmakers involved. Programmed by Inga, a Pilsen bookshop, and hosted by Watershed, a space for thinking across and with art & ecology.
This program is supported by Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund in partnership with Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Sunday, September 22
1-4pm
Thursday, September 19th
6-8pm
The contributors In Land.Place.Belonging. #2 are:
🌱 Lydia Cheshewalla: indigenous artist living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion engages with place-based relationship. 🌱 CA Conrad: somatic ritual poet and author shares their conversations with animals and ghosts and shares some of their recent poetry. 🌱 Csilla Hodí: embodied public space researcher and mycologist who talks to practices thinking with fungi in outsider & migrating contexts. 🌱 Elijah Rodriguez: speaks to the heart centered work of listening deeply to plants and community to guide in how he responds to and stewards urban land. 🌱 Phera Singh: queer, mixed, Punjabi & Sikh shares their reciprocal relationship with wild willow through the handcraft of basketry. 🌱 Marina ‘Heron’ Tsaplina: interdisciplinary eco-puppetry artist, writer and disability culture activist who stories her work with forests and soil. 🌱 Adam Grossi: writer, painter and teacher of embodied spirituality and psychological stability speaks to the inner instability of opening to authentic consciousness. 🌸 Illustrations throughout the book (and on this post) by Fiona Cook
Monday, September 2nd
6pm
2024 marks the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak disaster, which remains the worst industrial disaster in history. For nearly four decades, gas-exposed communities in Bhopal continue to face significantly higher mortality rates, various diseases, neurological disorders, and two generations of birth defects. Today, well over 150,000 people in Bhopal are battling chronic illnesses that are related to their own exposure or that of their parents, and 500,000 lives remain physically and economically harmed from the disaster. These survivors will present an account of how gas-exposed communities in Bhopal have persisted for 40 years, treating illness and documenting the continued environmental pollution and damage to health faced in their communities. We will also discuss how the fight for environmental justice in Bhopal is fundamentally linked to the fight for environmental justice in Chicago, and how international solidarity can empower our movements for liberation.
Saturday, July 27
7-9pm
"From the manual retouching processes of the 19th century to the instantaneous beauty filters of the 21st century, how has photo-editing shaped the way we see ourselves and each other? Do manipulated photos warp our perception of reality? Do un-manipulated photos exist? Has the ubiquity of digital photography and publishing platforms exacerbated our insecurities, or helped to expand our ideas of beauty? Body Images grapples with these questions while providing historical context to our contemporary anxieties."
Readings by @lizbarrrr, @solemnburger & @adgzines ✨🧃 light refreshments will be provided 😷 masks are required (while not actively eating or drinking), and there will be air purifiers in the space
Tuesday, May 7th
6-10pm
Showing are OMICRON (1963)—between ironic science fiction, comedy, surrealism, television investigation, and journalism: a tale of "alienation" via the extraterrestrial possession of a factory worker's body—and RED ARMY/PFLP: DECLARATION OF WORLD WAR—a propaganda newsreel film promoting the Palestinian resistance via the the everyday banality of military training and slow-paced preparation exercises
for imminent battle. In both films, reading (on- and off-screen) plays a pivotal role.
Organized in collaboration with Will Lee. 🇵🇸🧰🛠🦠 We'll start at or shortly after 6pm, with an intermission at 8pm before the second film. Drinks on-site, BYOP 🍿
Saturday, April 27
6-7:30pm
Come through to learn more about the work of the Debt Collective, the strides being made toward student load debt abolition, and how you can get involved.
Wednesday, April 17
6-7pm
Sunday, April 7th
3:30-6pm
On the 44th anniversary of his martyrdom, we’re screening Moñsenor: The Last Journey of Oscar Romero, a documentary with footage of Romero and his proximity to liberation theology, including a wide range of interviews with those whose lives were changed by him, including church activists, human rights lawyers, former guerrillas, politicians, and most importantly, everyday people.
🔊 In addition, we'll have music, Yolocamba Ita's Misa Popular Salvadoreña, Salvadoran snacks and coffee, and a post-screening discussion connecting Romero's legacy of denouncing oppression with the contemporary condition in El Salvador under Bukele of militarized repression; crackdowns on organized social movements—including the arrests of union leaders, organizers, and activists; and widespread disappearances.
All are welcome, and where necessary/possible things will be translated from English to Spanish and vice versa. Doors open at 3:30pm, with the screening beginning at 4pm.
Sunday, March 24th
12-2pm
"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
Saturday, March 23rd
6-8pm
🌊 ⚓️ 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
Saturday, March 2nd
5:30-8pm
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.
Sunday, February 25th
6-8pm
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
