The hearing voices café/Lak café/Lahakmal community library

Abstract

The Hearing Voices Café - Ten days of voices being heard / 21 - 30.01.2022: A project initiated by Dora García in collaboration with Jayampathi Guruge and many others. The Hearing Voices Café revolves primarily around exchange, community, experiment, memory, research, struggle and destigmatization. A Hearing Voices Café in Sri Lanka had the extra layer of exploring experimental modes of live performance, literary affinities weaving enduring trauma and healing, as well as feminist legacies, and sacred knowledge practices such as Sufism, with 10 episodes, one on each day of the festival.

Lak Café: Lak Café in Colombo hosted The Hearing Voices Café, with a series of activities that explored contiguities between the personal and the collective experiences, incidental encounters, and the modalities by which language operates in the processes of sharing testimonies and responsive witnessing. The Hearing Voices Cafe was a collective project that was presented by Dora García in collaboration with performance artist Jayampathi Guruge among several guest artists and writers

Lakmahal Community Library: The Lakmahal Community Library was envisioned as a space of rest and refuge for autonomous learning, the activation of feminist vocabularies, and artist-led publishing that challenges the linear codes of reading and hierarchical dissemination in the publishing industry. This specially conceived reading room was titled Reading in Tongues, borrowing from queer Chicana poet, writer, and feminist theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa’s text ‘Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.’ The spatial design has been composed by ADM Architects, keeping in view the generous ambience of a historic household and garden. It also acted as a counterpoint to the Colombo Public Library by bringing oral cultures on par with the published word; making room for sharing literature in privacy and in kinship; immersing in multilingual poetry and Zine making, which reorient our relationship with the book as a multifold body. Addressing the intimacy and hardship of writing as a ‘Third World Woman’, Anzaldúa encourages us in this cataclysmic present to remain open and courageous in using our languages as an embrace of the world: May ‘we continue to swim fearless with the length of our own bodies, in a sea of words’.