Please join us on Saturday 21 November, 5-7pm, to celebrate the launch of the first title by Editions Semblance,The Shoplifter’s Monologue: A short play by Silvia Bombardini.
Book launch and performative reading by the author.
Saturday 21 November, 5–7pm
Performance at 6pm
❥ The Shoplifter’s Monologue by Silvia Bombardini is a short play set at the turn of the 20th century and centred on its sole character, Lisa, and her reasons and techniques for stealing. Informed by Bombardini’s wider research into shoplifters’ clothes at this time in history, the play considers the role that the inventive clothing Lisa might have worn could have played in her shoplifting practice. The choice of monologue as a medium draws attention to the silence of female criminals in the archives where records of their thefts are kept, and to the absence of successful shoplifters and what they wore from these historical accounts.
❥ Dr. Silvia Bombardini is an Associate Lecturer, currently teaching at LCF, LCC, CSM and Kingston University. Her PhD examined shoplifters’ clothes at the turn of the 20th century. Her MRes re-evaluated luxury counterfeits from feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial perspectives. Bombardini has contributed to edited books (Radical Fashion Exercises, The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces) and peer-reviewed journals (The Sociological Review, Excursions). Before entering academia, she was a journalist and wrote a regular ‘Coming of Age’ column for Modern Weekly China. Bombardini is also a film curator, having previously worked with MUBI, and currently curates the documentary selection for the ASVOFF film festival in Paris.
❥Editions Semblance is a new publishing imprint founded by Guillaume Chuard (Studio Ardworks). Moving freely between the archival and the contemporary, art and literature, the classical and the avant-garde, humour and drama, Semblance publishes works in which the book becomes a prop in its own story.