Baudelaire's Birthday and journeys of transformation, 2025 edition / Egg /
Poetry Sydney and Garden Creative Lounge partner under the artistic direction of Michael Aiken for a project series on Transformation in five partitions 2024 – 2028 with the curatorial scope to reflect the diversity of cultural, political and social perspectives that preoccupy poets in our communities in our collective histories with relation to a commitment to the work, and practices of Charles Baudelaire.
For our ongoing series of annual events to mark the birthday of Charles Baudelaire, we invite artists of all kinds to respond to the theme of transformation – creatively, intellectually, viscerally, spiritually, and in any other way you feel compelled.
Each edition of this event will further venture into a specific area of transformation. In 2024, that sub-theme was laying down roots. Laying down roots. Because, although transformation can be a messy and chaotic, or a sleek and abrupt shift from one state to another, transformation encompasses creation and endurance far more vastly than it does destruction and cessation.
P R O G R A M : E G G
Host:
M I C H A E L A I K E N
Features:
H O L L Y I S E M O N G E R
E R A N D E G U Z M A N
C H A R L E S F R E Y B E R G
G A R E T H J E N K I N S
A I L E E N M O K A
P E T E R M I L L E R – R O B I N S O N
S I D S L E D G E
Panel discussion: E G G
M I C H A E L A I K E N
S I D S L E D G E
A N G E L A S T R E T C H
https://events.humanitix.com/celebrating-charles-baudelaire-2025-edition-e-g-g6pm for 7pm
Thursday 10 April 2025
El Rocco Bar
154 Brougham Street, Close to the Cnr of William Street, Kings Cross
‘I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge…’
Curatorial direction from
Michael Aiken
The germ of Charles Baudelaire’s work crawls into life in the mid-19th
century, extending its
reach towards the turn of the 20th
. His ideas provoke, then and now, ongoing responses to our
quickly shifting world. He excavates the swiftly changing, ever-urbanizing Paris of the industrial
revolution, as he not only observes but gets in amongst the transformations of place, people and
community occurring around and within him.
Taking this as our leaping point, Baudelaire’s Birthday has adopted Transformation as our
enduring theme. Following on from last year’s edition of ”Laying down roots”, this year the
edition theme is “Egg”.
More on Egg as theme: Birds. Spiders. Mammals. Xenomorphs. The diversity of creatures and creations which rely on an egg stage in order to develop and thrive is a testament to that form’s efficiency and potency. Concise and self-contained, our use of ‘Egg’ as this year’s thematic prompt is intentionally provocative. Eggs are the very embodiment of potential: a safe, protected shelter where new creations can incubate, grow and emerge. But in order that whatever delightful creation inside might burst into the world, the egg itself must also be destroyed. This paradox, that the egg can only finally achieve its purpose through its own destruction, should serve as an existential reminder to us all: potential forever unused is not potent. Egg also compels retrospective contemplation: how did we (and the Egg) come to be? An egg is never self-generated, despite its self-sustaining nature. Although complete and insulated from the world for now, an egg must come from something (or some one). Thus, as a thematic prompt, Egg encourages participants to think on and respond to the vast investment of energy, thought, time and self-sacrifice that is often necessary before an egg can be formed. To consider that, in many cases, a life time of effort may be exhausted in order to create both the egg itself, and the conditions necessary for its survival. The effort of planning and building a nest, eliminating known threats, guarding and nurturing the incubation period, and so on… And, wether driven by biological instinct or a conscientious commitment to the future, the predecessor(s) of every egg often give so much of themselves for the sake of that investment, that they deplete their own vitality long before the true potential of the egg emerges. Parents may die before their hatchlings develop; visionary artists may starve in obscurity many generations before the impact of their oeuvre impels new types of creative expression to emerge. For some, eggs are a nuisance: a parasitic attachment that consumes the ignorant or docile host its parent delivered it to. Cuckoos push their foster-siblings from the nest in order to grow bigger and more powerful than even their foster parents will ever be. Many insect larvae eat their hosts from the inside out, ending other potential futures that are too incapable of adaptation.
In exploring this theme, we encourage artists to press further in these and other directions suggested by “Egg”.
Be serious.
Be playful.
Be daring.
And remember: an egg produces nothing unless the egg is broken.
Our featured poets will be responding to this theme, and participants in the open mic are likewise so encouraged.
*Open mic strictly on the night, and there is no pre-registrations.