Reading by David Colosi: A CONFLUENCE OF SNAILS
SNAILEIDOLIA | Installation View | Earth Day Snail Safari with Matthew Wills | A Confluence of Snails | Snails in the Future Perfect | pdf press release | On Hyperallergic
Saturday May 06, 6pm
at Open Source Gallery
306 17th Street
Join us at Open Source on May 06 at 6pm as David introduces and reads from A CONFLUENCE OF SNAILS inside the installation. The work will be available as a limited draft and art edition for reading attendees.
A CONFLUENCE OF SNAILS is a novel in six stories where humans interact with snails and snails speak their minds. Each fictional story pushes beyond the edge of recent factual research found in the media and medical and conservation journals to consider the tension between the human desire to use snails as an extractive resource or simply letting a snail be a snail. At the center of the story, Snailnasium Inc. operates as a for-profit research facility and
entertainment center where scientists experiment with snail introductions into human futures. In the earliest story, a student joins her science fair with a project demonstrating how to eat Rosy Wolf Snails to conserve endemic species. A couple then having difficulty conceiving a child enlists the help of a fertility snail hoping to exploit the biology of love darts. Snailnasium Inc. gets its full tour in the third story, until, in the fourth, a yearling snail outlines its class’s incorporation of radiation into its shell and hopes to return to the Bikini Atoll of its ancestors. Time passes into a future where the work at Snailnasium Inc. produces a way to implant snail DNA into humans as a corrective for homelessness. The final story consists of excerpts from the first conference of gastropods where species from around the world discuss their common predator, Homo sapiens.
The novel plays on previous literary models from George Orwell’s Animal Farm to Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Other literary alignments include Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conchologists First Book, Patricia Highsmith’s two horror stories about snails, Megan Milks’ erotic coming of age story, Slug, and Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus.
