Writing on Raving is a reading and performance series curated by Zoë Beery, Geoffrey Mak and McKenzie Wark. The series opens a space for critical thinking, creative language, and verbal performance that celebrates, critiques, contextualizes, and vibe-checks the rave, the club, the dance floor, and techno from diverse and unheard perspectives. Featuring readings and performances by Zoë Beery, Sebastian Hernandez, Haley Hopkins, Michelle Lhooq, Geoffrey Mak, Natalie Robehmed and weepingwillowtree. 

Zoë Beery is a journalist and harm reduction worker in Brooklyn. She has co-organized safer spaces programs for Nowadays, Sustain-Release, Horst Arts & Music, and Return to the Source. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Resident Advisor, and many other publications. 
Sebastian Hernandez is a multi-disciplinary artist and DJ, who received a B.A. in both Art Practice and Dance and Performance Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Sebastian explores making art with mediums like movement, sculpture, performance, photography, creative writing and DJing. Hernandez works with and through feminist, queer, indigenous and gender theoretical frameworks as well as notions of collectivity to generate works that complicate Mexican and Chicano narratives in the contemporaneous social imagination. Their art making is embedded in personal narrative, their indigenous Mexica (Aztec) ancestry, queer club culture and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Sebastian’s movement based practice is informed by their long standing practice of danza Mexica (Azteca), Vogue and a wide range of modern dance techniques like GAGA, Flying Low, Laban and Afro Modern. Expanding and growing from solo works to more collaborative art works and performances, Sebastian has worked with a variety of visual, sound, dance and fashion designers specific to their hometown of Los Angeles. These collaborative works have become a channel for new creative challenges that push to question and speak to the complexities of queer kinship and traditional art and dance today. Hernandez has presented work at REDCAT, Human Resources, LACE, Commonwealth& Council, MOCA Geffen Contemporary, ICA LA, MUSTACHE Mondays, Club Scum, NAVEL LA, ONE ARCHIVES, 4th street Bridge, Santee Alley, BOFFO, Performance Space New York, Palm Spring Art Museum, Jessica Silverman Gallery and more. In 2020, Sebastian was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award. 

haley hopkins is a longtime dancer and friend to the rave scene. They have a background in performance art, critical theory and herbalism.  In the daytime world they work with native plants, art handle and write.  They’re concerned with exploring/exploding power dynamics and playing language games, they feel devotion to class analysis and dirt.  

Michelle Lhooq is a writer who, by some combination of tenacity and youthful stupidity, decided to make a career out of being really, really good at partying. She was born in Singapore, an anti-hedonic country that William Gibson famously called “Disneyland with the death penalty,” and growing up under its extreme restrictions on assorted freedoms made her obsessed with drugs and nightlife like a bad kink. Lhooq’s work, mainly published in her newsletter Rave New World, is currently centered on the shifting paradigms of counterculture, underground raves, and psychedelics. She is the author of  WEED: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask (Penguin Random House), and her writing can also be found in The Guardian, GQ, The Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg. Once in a blue moon, she throws psychedelic parties in Los Angeles, where she is based.

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Artforum, The Guardian, Spike, and other publications. He has staged “performative readings” at Swiss Institute, CTM Festival, Kaje, and The Lab. He lives in Brooklyn. 

Natalie Robehmed (aka Ghorba) is a Lebanese-British writer, musician and DJ. She has performed alongside artists including Rrose, Mama Snake and Light Asylum across the U.S. and Europe. She co-created the Feminist Synth Lab, a workshop series and synthesizer lending library for marginalized genders in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Forbes and CNN as well as on several hit podcasts. Brought up in the U.A.E, they are now based in Los Angeles. 

cleo (weepingwillowtree) is a DJ and digital media artist from Palmdale. The majority of her work explores themes of horror, self discovery and acceptance, and her roots as a black trans woman. 

Admission to this event is free. HR’s entrance is accessible via ramp, and an ADA-compliant restroom is located on our ground floor. Indoor mask use is recommended.