Language Is a Temptation: Emmy Catedral reads July 26 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory

Language Is a Temptation: writer, performer and multimedia artist Emmy Catedral reads July 26 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Emmy Catedral is an artist and writer. She presents work as The Explorers Club of Enrique de Malacca, The Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees, and as herself. Work has been presented at Queens Museum, The New York Historical Society, LaMama Experimental Theater Club, Primetime, Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery and Department of Astronomy, Center for Book Arts, and Akron Art Museum, among others. Readings and performances have been presented at Recess, 601 Artspace, Wendy’s Subway, The Segue Reading Series, Present Co. and other unnamed and temporarily named sites. Emmy is currently the Fairs & Editions Coordinator at Printed Matter, Inc. She is also co-librarian of the bi-coastal and mobile Pilipinx American Library, and is a member of the Advisory Board of The Octavia Project. She DJs as Pers Lab.

Language Is a Temptation is a series of 3 minute readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory that are posted on our Instagram, YouTube, and website daily at 3pm.

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on a month long experiment: every day she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a journal. The result was a groundbreaking, conceptual work, comprised of more than 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text. Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic work of poetry and photography investigates the nature of memory: its surfaces, textures and material.

In July 2020, Poets House and Siglio Press embark on a month long daily experiment: a passage from the corresponding day in 1971 will be read by poets, writers, critics, and artists, as a parallel durational work that celebrates the new publication of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), which brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form.