Reading and Presentation with Lara Konrad
Mother, We All Have Been Lonely and Lovely Places serves as a trajectory of personal history, narrating the various stages of female dependency in a patriarchal landscape. As the book intimately examines emotional and sexual behavioral patterns of relationships that (re)formulate in accordance to the inevitable process of aging, its readers not only witness adopted gender performativities within society, but gradually begin to notice the universal longing to unearth purpose in hopes of outgrowing human loneliness.
Born in Germany, Lara Konrad spent most of her childhood in Mexico. She holds a BA in Creative Writing (The New School) and an MFA in Fine Arts (Sandberg Institute). Her writings have appeared in a diverse set of international publications, including Das Magazin, Die Welt, NYTyrant, ZEIT. Mother, We All Have Been Lonely and Lovely Places (Gato Negro Ediciones) is her first book of prose.
Since 2013, Gato Negro Ediciones has acted as a recognizably-urgent voice in independent publishing across the cultural realm. Advocating the liberty of thought, the Mexico City-based press intentionally prints titles that challenge the so-often sequestered view of contemporary society. In a new world where temporary excess and obstruction of knowledge are lived at its height, Gato Negro returns the voices of their authors to the fundamental purpose of the book. By remaining inside the economically-amicable yet unconstrained process that is risograph printing, an archive of over 140 titles has been successfully called into life ever since its inception. From political manifests to art theory and prose, the books of Gato Negro do not wish to deconstruct reality through ornamental distractions that lately seem to have become an inevitable requisite within the modern history of publishing. Instead, Gato Negro embraces the deliberately-chosen content in its most primal form: straightforward and entire. And therefore, ever-growing in context. The outcome of each publication is a dialogue between reader and creator — an ecological construction of selfhood that distills collective contemplation while all we do is live.