Opening 17 Nov 2022 18:00 – 21:00

Lucy Beech’s new film Warm Decembers, reimagines a poetic verse novel written by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 – 2009), which took nine years to complete, and was described as recording a ​“crisis in writing.” At the end of the poem Sedgwick originally included her notes, which she was unable to integrate, but unwilling to dispose of. By publishing her discarded fragments Sedgwick preserves her poetical remains as waste; serving up the leftovers of the poems construction and advertising the revisions and erasures that have made it. Inspired by Sedwick’s act of creative salvage, the film takes her notes as an invitation for artistic interpretation and experiments with the poem’s discordant flows; often depicting processes of consumption and abjection and exploring the ways in which bodies, identities and creative works survive their own destruction.

Warm Decembers was scripted through an exchange of ideas with writer Cassie Westwood, author of The Abject Animal Poetics of The Warm Decembers originally published in the book Bathroom Songs (2017) by Punctum Books. Westwood features in the work performing part of her recent text The Use of The Poem in Transition (2022), which starts from a series of questions:„What do I want to keep of the prior me? What will be staying with me, whether I like it or not?“ She describes how Sedgwick’s diverse attitude to waste materials has helped her make sense of her own false starts and necessary revisions; as she works to integrate memories, desires, or identifications that she was led to believe were incompatible – or unacceptable – with the identity she was assigned at birth.

Warm Decembers was produced with the help of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.