Counterlexicon

Mirene Arsanios

Language is never neutral. Words such as ‘genocide’, ‘anti-Semitism’, ‘self-defence’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘right to exist’ have become contested territories – indicators of radically divergent worldviews, laden with the weight of collective and personal histories.

This workshop takes the practice of Controlessico as its starting point: a collective effort to examine, reclaim and redefine the words through which we make sense of the world. Drawing on the intersection of language, memory and political experience, participants will explore how concepts shift between personal testimony and public discourse, between silence and speech.

The afternoon will begin with a collective reading of selected texts, followed by a guided writing workshop open to students and the public. Participants will be invited to contribute to a shared glossary – a new alphabet of lived and contested terms drawn from our present, with a particular focus on current global liberation struggles.

The texts produced may be presented to the public at the end of the day.

Limited places available; registration required no later than three days before the event by writing to: iscrizione@lungomare.org

Mirene Arsanios

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collections The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019) and The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). Her essays and short stories have appeared in e-flux journal, VIDA, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, Guernica and Fence, among others. Arsanios co-founded the 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founder of Makhzin magazine, a bilingual English/Arabic publication dedicated to innovative writing. She lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches at the Pratt Institute, and currently serves as Programme Director at the Poetry Project.

Manuela Pacella

Manuela Pacella (Rome, 1977) is an art historian and critic. She writes regularly for books, exhibition catalogues and specialist journals. Her publications include Bertille Bak. La fiaba del reale (Postmedia Books, 2018) and Tell me stories! (Politi Seganfreddo edizioni, 2024), a book based on the column of the same name published in Flash Art Italia (2020–24). In the fields of publishing, writing and teaching, she has long been committed to analysing that liminal zone of critical writing that blurs the boundaries between genres, leading to theoretical fiction. Her course in Critical Writing within the two-year programme in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (Rome campus), is characterised precisely by a trajectory that shifts from academic and critical writing towards a freer and less regulated textual form.