TRIES:
The Temporary Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Enthusiasts and Imitators Society
with DR Season Butler
Course Structure: 1 x monthly 2 hour session
Course Venue: Online & by correspondence
Course Dates: May - July 2021
Course Fee: Pay-what-you-can
Through the course, we will become experts in R W-R’s practice and expand our own by experimenting with visual-textual practice and creating an archive of our experience as a temporary society. I expect that the logistical particularities of our current conditions will contribute texture to the experience.
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in 1932. From her apartment in East Berlin, she developed a text-art practice including her famous mail art, informed by the GDR’s travel restrictions and censorship policies. She stopped making new work in 1989.
This course is for:
LGBTQIA+ individuals with an interest in going soft and slow
Folks who like words and movement
I keep thinking that I’ll find time to start copying Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s work, but I’ve been putting it off for years. I daydream about riffing on it and letting experiments occur to me and developing my own style of typewriter work, concrete poetry (signs fiction?), narrative tessellations, visual jokes, mail art…I keep thinking that I’ll find the time and headspace in the lag between holidays, or at the end of term, or when I finished my PhD. Etc.
I want to do it now, under the conditions of now. In aid of this, I’m starting the Temporary Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Enthusiasts and Imitators Society.
TRIES will meet once a month for four months to talk about Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s work, contexts, inspirations, related practices and other material we’re inspired to share. Following each meeting, members will make work (postcard or standard letter size) to distribute by post to the rest of the group
For more, check out:
‘The Stasi didn't understand anything,’ Die Welt newspaper 2016 article on R W-R’s life and work
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer in Performance Studies and Creative Writing. She thinks a lot about youth and old age; solitude and community; negotiations with hope and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future. Season’s current work-in-progress explores bodies and identities in constant motion, crossing borders, heading from crash to crash. Her recent artwork has appeared in the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Exchange, the Latvian National Museum (Riga) and Hotel Maria Kapel (Netherlands). Her debut novel, Cygnet, was published in spring 2019 and won the Writer’s Guild 2020 Award for Best First Novel. She lives and works between London and Berlin.
Images:
1) Lead Image: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Still Life, 1979
2) Secondary image: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, 1974
3) Bio Image by Christa Holka