Presentation of the publishing house flores degeneradas and its new book "A las plantas" by Mercedes Villalba

Presentation of the degenerate book "A las plantas" by Mercedes Villalba, published by flores degeneradas. The author will read excerpts from the publication, accompanied by one of her editors, Rebeca Pérez Gerónimo, who will talk about the impulse to edit and the collaboration with Mercedes.

A las plantas, by Mercedes Villalba
A bouquet of readings that go through different times of Mercedes Villalba's work. Between essays, correspondence, interviews, poetry, we read about plants, our relationship with the wild environment in different latitudes through different characters. A publication, a flower, that reflects on the praxis and politics of rottenness, invasion and plants.

Fragment / from "Erosion".
I wish this text could be read all at the same time.
That it could be felt as a depth, a set of movements and materials, a path guided by its forms and textures, rather than by anticipation. I would like it to ignite desire, opening the way to the pleasure of surfaces. I would like this text to be additive as a list of synonyms for mundane words like, yes and ground and floor.

Before the presentation Mercedes Villalba, author of Manifiesto Ferviente y Rebeca Pérez Gerónimo, founder of Ediciones Concordia will conduct the workshop herramientas para placeres futuros: fermentación, escritura y edición colectiva.

About flores generadas:

flores degeneradas finds its materiality in the form of books, as well as collective encounters centred on writing and reading, where they seek to experiment with the notions of contamination, unexpected pollination, heterogeneity, diversity and care. Their books inhabit multiple literary genres and crossovers between different disciplines.  The degenerate traverses the idea of genre (genus) in its literary sense and also as a differentiator between women, men, and other denominations.

The experimentation that interests them most has mostly been written by women or by people who have had to question their place in taxonomies from the beginning of their lives. They believe that the possibility of a more promiscuous reading could expand the limited canon that has been sold to us as Literature. With their books they want to contaminate the textual waters with elements from outside - a contamination that instead of harming revives the flora. They pursue a practice that is open, careful, in correspondence and in tune with both the present and the future, the text under construction and the possible experiences that emerge from the book.

www.floresdegeneradas.com

BIOS:

Mercedes Villalba is an Argentinean researcher and writer. She studied Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires and at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is now a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, where she researches the commodification of mineral landscapes. She has published articles, translations, essays and poems in Spanish and English in magazines such as The Plant, Too Much, Les Chroniques Purple, Compost, Ramona, Correspondencia, Papersky, Segunda Época and Eco-colo. His "Manifiesto Ferviente" was published in English, Spanish and Portuguese by Calipso Press and No Libros in 2019 and in Catalan by Ediciones La Escocesa in 2022. She sometimes makes fanzines.

Rebeca Pérez Gerónimo (Caracas, 1989) Editor and fermentist. She studied Literature at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Currently studying for a Master's degree in Latin American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, with a focus on Gender Studies. She has attended intensive writing workshops with Samanta Schweblin, Vera Giaconi and Federico Falco. Founder and editor-in-chief of the editorial laboratory Ediciones Concordia, where she works at the intersection between herbs, fermentation and literature. Co-founder of the publishing house flores degeneradas. As an editor, she also works with collectives interested in ecology, feminism, food, art publications and creative writing. Her practice focuses on processes and contamination as collaboration.

*If you have any needs or questions regarding the accessibility of the workshop, please write to produccio(at)laescocesa.org.