Transfixions: in conversation with Shola von Reinhold
The Research Center for Material Culture at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam is pleased to invite author Shola von Reinhold for a book talk and conversation on her novel LOTE. The conversation will delve into the questions around archival practices of subjugation and objectification based on the novel’s pursuit of aesthetics and beauty that occurs whilst attempting to ‘recover’ forgotten artistic and literary figures of the past. By doing so, the novel interrogates the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history. These archival figures become ‘Transfixions’ within Shola’s writing.
The talk will be moderated by researcher and artist Carine Zaayman.
About the book
Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the “Bright Young Things,” the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the ’20s and ’30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the ’30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda’s “Escapes” through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.
Speakers
Shola von Reinhold is a writer and artist from Scotland. Her first novel LOTE won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black prize for fiction. Her second book, The Rebis Book is out in October 2026 and with Montez Press.
Carine Zaayman is an artist, curator, researcher and research coordinator at the Research Center for Material Culture/Wereldmuseum. She is committed to a radical reconsideration of colonial archives and museum collections.
