9 September 2020, 19:03 | The Island Club
EDEN, EDEN, EDEN

The Island Club joins the Association Pierre Guyotat in celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Eden, Eden, Eden, presenting one of fifty readings which will take place around the world on September 9th. The reading will comprise the final pages of Eden, Eden, Eden in a Greek translation by Christodoulos Panayiotou, read at sunset by Veronica Georgiou.

Since its release with publishing house Gallimard on September 9th, 1970, Eden, Eden, Eden has provoked fascinations and scandals. Deemed a “Saharian fiction”, it was instantly praised by Michel Foucault and published with forewords by Michel Leiris, Roland Barthes, and Philippe Sollers. Upon being censored, the work gained immediate international support by the likes of Joseph Beuys, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Boulez, Italo Calvino, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Fifty years later, the work of Pierre Guyotat – who passed away on February 7th of this year – exerts an ever-growing impact, having proven to be prescient of a world on the verge of transformation. Bringing together violence, sexuality, and cosmology, Eden, Eden, Eden signals the endpoint of colonialism and the starting point of a new history for language.

Pierre Guyotat (9 January 1940, Bourg-Argental – 7 February 2020, Paris) is the author of one of the most radical oeuvres of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An early critic of colonial oppression, he played a major role in the opening-up of culture, sexuality and art by developing the most extreme form of epic fiction. His last published book, Idiocy (2018), won the Prix Médicis, the Prix de la langue française, and the Prix special of the jury Fémina. His work has been translated in Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, English, Dutch, Spanish, and other languages. His drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, New York, Los Angeles, and Brussels, and will be featured in Manifesta in the fall of 2020. Guyotat’s archive is held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.