Arti Bookclub #4 | Dorien de Wit

This afternoon is spoken in Dutch.

In the fourth edition of the ABC, Emily Kocken will be in conversation with Dorien de Wit. She works as a writer and artist at the intersection of image, language, and perception. Her work includes text, drawings, installations, and (audio) walks. Her poetry debut Eindig de dag nooit met een vraag (De Arbeiderspers) was awarded the Poetry Debut Prize (2022).

Fresh off the press is heim, or the story of my dizziness, a hybrid book and a personal exploration of the relationship between anxiety and travel, between language and a sense of home, and of what a wavering body has to say. What came first, the anxiety or the dizziness? Dorien de Wit delves into memories, calculates the distance to the spacecraft Pioneer 10, swims in icy water, travels via Street View, follows Alice down the rabbit hole, and explores the vestibular system. In clear, poetic language she weaves all of this together to understand her anxiety and ultimately set out on a journey.

This is the prose debut of a poet, on the border between memoir, essay, and poetry. In the conversation, which will be accompanied live by cellist Maya Fridmann, we follow Dorien in ever smaller circles around the contours of her anxiety, testing and gently stretching its limits. She will also read poems and fragments from both books, and we will discover how her visual and literary practices relate to each other and, in a surprising way, throw each other off balance.