Kwan Queenie Li: 'Weeds' [Book club]

Join Kwan Queenie Li, the author of Weeds: A Germinating Theory, for a very special edition of the AA Book Group.

Anyone who has read the book is welcome to join but free RSVP (HERE) is necessary.

Thursday 26 February 
18:00-20:00

AA Bookshop 
33 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES
United Kingdom 

About Weeds: A Germinating Theory

For over a decade, artist and theorist Kwan Queenie Li has been photographing weeds across the world. From Jerusalem to Shanghai, Varanasi to Athens, Cairo to Mexico City, she has trained her attention on these unintended but ubiquitous inhabitants of the contemporary urban sphere, finding them dwelling in corners and cracks, in spaces suspended between uses, in ruins and on construction sites.

This essay in image and text proposes a new view of cities that learns from the weed’s point of view, dissolving familiar categories and temporalities to see cities as evolving and often undefined spaces, replete with opportunity. Weeds organically defy phenomena that are taken for granted as immovable: walls, borders, history, and prescribed identities. They are registers of the real lives of cities – of disuse and neglect, but also freedom and porousness. Out-of-place by definition, they offer a new perspective on the idea of ‘place’ itself, and the ways it shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants.

Weeds: A Germinating Theory is published as part of Sightlines.

Can't make it? Order a copy here.