The first event at Lateral Roma and the first in the series (Thursday) Here's Why I Did Not Go To Work Today took the form of an ex­­change of works by people we met here in Rome: Giulia Crispiani, Meloe Gennai and Jahān Khājavi gave a rea­­ding, Basile Dinbergs pre­sen­ted a sound piece. Our con­tri­bu­tions, Geraldine Tedder and PRICE, re­volved around thoughts we had for foun­ding Lateral Roma. This first en­coun­ter took place in PRICE’s studio, which is lo­cated in the gar­­den of the Istituto Svizzero di Roma – a space that has been gran­ted to us and we wan­ted to under­­stand and trans­­form into a kind of “fungo” for the evening.

Giulia Crispiani is a writer and visual artist based in Rome, where she is an editor for NERO Edi­tions and Teatro di Roma. Her favo­­rite media for the written for­mat are inter­­views, love letters and mani­festoes.

Basile Dinbergs is a Geneva based artist. In long-term, ever-changing projects, he ex­plores alter­native eco­­no­­mies and attempts to think of affect, friend­ship and collec­tivity as part of the pro­cess of pro­duc­tion. He works with sound, per­for­mance, text and object.

Meloe Gennai is a poet, performer and legalist. Meloe pub­lished their first book of poems Temps, intempéries, tempérament in 2017 and they are cur­ren­tly working on their first novel We don’t cry no more on decon­struc­ting ideo­logies in the western psyche, hea­ling and ances­tral guidance. Meloe will read from a series of sexual shapes, expres­sions and femmex flow poetry.

Jahān Khājavi composes and performs “wildly amusing & explicit queer poetry” (Vogue). Recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in 14poems, Split Lip, Bæst, Dreampop, & the Foglifter an­tho­lo­gy Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart. Khājavi is also cur­ren­tly colla­bo­rating with Brandon Menke on a series of queer cowboy poems, some of which appear in Columbia Journal & Denver Quarterly.