rile* books

The recording of the reading with Claire Star Finch to celebrate the publication of their first novel Fuck Me Judith published by After 8, 2025. A groundbreaking, anachronistic experiment in literature informed by the counter traditions of New Narrative and queer writing. Claire Star will be joined in conversation by Chloe Chignell to talk queer literature, performative writing and the body as material.   About the bookIn Claire Star Finch’s first novel, love and the void question each other in action. Judith, an academic celebrity, and Wendy, a slightly less famous academic celebrity, fall in love. They break up. In her ensuing grief, Wendy finds herself in a pornographic, epistolary haze that slumps toward the narrative. Fueled by the only things that cut through the pain—sex and democratic theory—Wendy takes us along on her wild ride toward self-actualization. Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/fuck-me-judithAbout Claire Star FinchBorn in the United States and based in Paris, Star Finch writes and performs weird experimental pornography, at the intersection of theory and poetry. Their literary performances are regularly presented in art institutions in France and internationally (Palais de Tokyo Paris, ICA London, CAPC Bordeaux, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe). Their ongoing research interests include vomit and dildos, exploring how these materials function as literary technologies. In 2024, They received a doctorate from l’Université Paris 8 in Gender Studies for their dissertation that traced the literary queerfeminsms of Kathy Acker, Hélène Cixous, Violette Leduc, and Audre Lorde. With the collective RER Q, they stage the performance of sexually explicit literary texts. They are the author of the novel Fuck Me Judith (After 8 Books, 2025) and the poetry collection Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche [Spit in my mouth then spit in my other mouth] (Les petits matins, 2024). Their other literary projects include Kathy Acker 1971-1975 (Éditions Ismael, 2019), and contributions to Lettres aux jeunes poétesses [Letters to young poets] (l’Arche, 2021) and Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2022). With sabrina soyer, they translated the poet Lisa Robertson into French, in Debbie: une épopée [Debbie: An Epic] (Joca Seria, 2021).CreditsIntroduction and interview by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas

The recording of the launch of Exocapitalism – Economies with absolutely no limits (becoming press 2025), with authors Roberto Alonso Trillo and Marek Poliks that took place in rile* the 9th October 2025. Exocapitalism is a rigorous account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/exocapitalism-economies-with-absolutely-no-limitsAbout the publicationAt the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale.About the guestsMarek Poliks is a researcher in the philosophy of technology, especially with respect to deep learning. He’s based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marek and his primary research partner Roberto Alonso Trillo (HKBU) have been working to situate deep learning tools as endosymbiotic reproductive infrastructure (inorganic vehicles through which biological, epistemological, and social information is encoded, subject to contingent processes, and transmitted).Roberto Alonso Trillo is a theorist and artist whose work spans cultural theory, media philosophy, and experimental sound. Based in Hong Kong, his research engages the aesthetic and political dimensions of machine learning, with particular attention to infrastructural critique and performativity. In ongoing collaboration with Marek Poliks, he investigates AI theory and speculative design as part of a broader inquiry into automation and cultural production. His interdisciplinary practice extends into sound art, post-instrumental music, and critical pedagogy.  CreditsIntroduction by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas

The recording of the launch of Crossings: creative ecologies of cruising, a collaborative work by queer scholar João Florêncio and artist Liz Rosenfeld from the 29th of June 2025. After a reading from the book, Liz Rosenfeld was joined in conversation with Chloe Chignell.Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/crossings-creative-ecologies-of-cruisingAbout the publicationCrossings is not your conventional book. It hovers in the charged space between academic inquiry and literary experimentation, between critical manifesto and queer sex memoir—Crossings is an erotic hybrid form that dares to think through desire, with desire. Throughout its chapters the book moves swiftly between  different streams of discourse from theoretical conversations to reflections on aesthetic and artistic practice  to sensuous descriptions of bodily encounters. The writing darts in and out of these thought spaces with such dynamic that it thoroughly, and pleasurably, disoriented me as a reader and had me pause to ask: what is sex? And what is theory?  In this work, an artist and an academic intertwine their voices in a dialogic exploration of cruising—not only as a sexual practice but as a method of knowing, remembering, and of constructing queer sociality. The book unfolds both the poetic and political forms that cruising enacts. Together Joao and Liz, take queer sex practices seriously as sites of knowledge production, opening up the possibility for other kinds of thinking that occur through the body and in public, in order to enact tenuous and vital spaces of queer community.About the authorsLiz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working across performance, moving image, experimental writing, and drawing. Their work explores questions of queer temporality, memory, and emotional and political ecologies, often through the lens of cruising and corporeal excess. Working with what they call "flesh as a non-binary collaborative material," Liz's practice, often auto-theoretical, questions how queer ontologies are grounded in variant and hypocritical desire(s.)Joao Florencio is a queer scholar currently work at the university of Linkskoping. His research draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary sex cultures. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig published by Routledge, in 2020.CreditsIntroduction and interview by Chloe ChignellThis podcast was edited by Ros Del OlmoThe intro music was composed by Ive Vargas

This episode brings you the recording of an evening of readings with authors Rosie Stockton and Hannah Baer. The event took place at our space in Brussels on the 7th of June 2025. Rosie and Hannah read from their recent work, followed by a conversation with Chloe Chignell.Find their books here:https://rile.space/authors/rosie-stocktonhttps://rile.space/authors/hannah-baerAbout the authorsBoth Rosie and Hannah are writers whose work engages rigorously with the poetics of desire, and with how language acts as a site that both makes and unmakes relations. In different ways, their writing troubles the idea of a coherent, stable, or “good” subject. They approach gender and identity as sites of negotiation, opacity, and play—doing so with a rare mix of clarity, humor, and formal experimentation.There’s something in both of their work that feels like it emerges from a deeply personal space that’s never fully private: a kind of intimacy that's always entangled with the social. Their writing makes room for contradiction, for not knowing and for desire as its own kind of thinking.Rosie Stockton is the author of two poetry books Permanent Volta and Fuel. Their poems are full of lyric loops, erotic tension, and deep attention to the structures—both poetic and social—that threaten to both hold and break us.Hannah Baer is the author of trans girl suicide museum. She writes across genre and form, weaving memoir, criticism, and theory into a writing that is as intellectually cutting as it is emotionally generous.CreditsIntroduction by Chloe Chignell This podcast was edited by Ros Del Olmo.The intro music was composed by Ive Vargas.

For this episode we’re delighted to bring back a reading by Ivan Cheng that took place on March 9th, 2025 in Brussels. Ivan Cheng reads from Confidences / Production, the fourth instalment in his Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement.About Confidences / ProductionActing like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.About Ivan Cheng Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) works with genres, languages, and their readings. Interested in the ambient and implicit, his performance work incorporates the site of presentation into a system for formatting text and historic references, often using the video camera as a structuring device. The process of making the work is related to accumulation and caching of information – memory between performance terms and machinic terms. His practice is variously represented by video, installation and publications.This episode was edited by Ros Del Olmo and the music was composed by Ive.