The Infernal Grove Study Group at VSW

The Infernal Grove Study Group brings into dialogue a group of artists from across the continent who have lived experience with substance-use, and who represent a range of current relationships to sobriety and its alternatives. In recovery programs, perhaps by necessity and certainly by design, there is a push to accept received wisdom. But for addict-intellectuals, it’s hard to forfeit critical thinking to recovery. In addiction, connection to the intellectual can become tenuous. It’s easy to lose the relationships and identities that support rigorous critical thinking. Recovery can mean recovering those relationships and identities.

The Infernal Grove Study Group meets both in-person and online, and invites the audience to engage in dialogue as participants with the moderators. This session, moderators will include Liz Roberts,  Mikiki,  Devon Narine-Singh, Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke.

The Infernal Grove Project takes place mostly on stolen Mi’kmaq and Onondaga land.

For more information:
Infernal Grove website; IGSG Instagram; The Infernal Grove Linktree
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How to participate:

This event will take place both in-person in the VSW microcinema, and remotely via Zoom.  Moderators will meet and discuss the film program (streaming here May 8-15th), then invite audience to participate in break-out discussions (participation is optional). Moderators and audience will re-convene to share key outtakes from the breakout discussions.

Program: Introduction by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby

VSW will host an online screening of the following related works that will stream from this site from May 8- May 15th:

The Limits of Vision, 2022, 30 minutes, Laura Harrison 

The Limits of Vision, based on Robert Irwin’s novel of the same name, features Marcia, a trapped housewife navigating shifting gender norms of early 1970’s South London, her coterie of undermining friends, and a dust king named Mucor, god of small things. The film touches on mortality, painting, white feminism, slippage, the impossibility of moral purity, and non attachment.

Prime Cuts, 1981, 20 minutes, Paul Wong 

Wong describes Prime Cuts as a work “…about style, technology and sexuality. Delivered in an unpolitical and distanced view, not unlike a commercial, we see life as an endless stream of sensuality.”  It is a surgically precise sendup of incipient West-Coast yuppiedom, precursor to the influencer culture, in which capitalist ideology has . from the gutter. It was that precise. It sliced open It was a nuanced, Brechtian sendup of the horrible people of the 80s, and it was clear to us from this work that Wong understood that style is something to be taken seriously: it’s somewhere form and content tighten into a tiny, unpickable knot.