AUTHOR EVENT: ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail’ with Hélène Giannecchini
House of Books & Friends is thrilled to welcome Hélène Giannecchini on Tuesday 24th March at 6pm to discuss their new book, ‘An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail’. The evening will involve a discussion, a Q&A, and a chance to get your book signed by Hélène.
Tickets
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As always, we have a limited amount of complimentary tickets for this event for anyone who needs it. Please contact us directly at bookworms@houseofbooksandfriends.com or call 07597365380.
About the book
After she encounters a poem about love and friendship etched on the Homomonument in Amsterdam, Hélène Giannecchini is moved to attempt to do justice to a form of relation often subordinated to romance. A friendship is a filiation we choose, one that can reconfigure our understanding of co-existence. It holds love, laughter, dissent and solidarity; it can be a site of political struggle, of reinvention and rest. Thinking back to her own unconventional family formation, she sets out to piece together an alternative genealogy of lives excluded from normative discourses, whose traces may only remain in memory and archival fragments.
In searching and sensitive prose, Giannecchini sifts the past to bring marginal existences into communion with each other, preserved through loving acts of witness and made full of meaning by friendship’s generative force. Roving from Saint-Just’s revolutionary ideal of amity to Donna Gottschalk’s photography documenting radical lesbian organizing in 1960s and ’70s New York, interspersed with unpublished images acquired magpie-like through chance and circumstance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail forms a slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century, and a moving testament to the liberatory power of friendship.
About the author
Hélène Giannecchini is a writer and curator, specialising in the relationship between text and image. In 2014 she published Une Image peut-être vraie. Alix Cléo Roubaud [translation by Theano Petrou, A Portrait in pieces, Sylph edition, 2023] with Seuil and directed the Alix Cléo Roubaud retrospective at the Bibliothèque nationale de France that same year. Her following novel, Voir de ses propres yeux [See With Your Own Eyes], was published in January 2020. Her new book Un désir démesuré d’amitié was released in August 2024. For several years now, she has been writing in collaboration with contemporary artists and she curated several exhibitions.
As a Doctor of Literature, she has given lectures at the Pompidou Centre, the Complutense University of Madrid, the University of Basel, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the Jeu de Paume, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, galerie Buchholz New York, among others. She was a resident of Villa Médicis in 2018-2019 and of Villa Albertine in 2022.