As part of the exhibition Beverly Buchanan. Weathering, with Ima-Abasi Okon, Jamaica Kincaid dedicates this special reading to one of her earliest texts, My Mother - a formative work in which she began to develop the voice and rhythm that would later characterize her writing. "It was one of those works," she recalls, "where I developed something that would later become my style. In a way, it was like teaching myself to walk."

In the reading and conversation that follows, Kincaid reflects on the intimate and complex relationship between writing, motherhood and gardening - a connection she first nurtured through her mother, whose garden was both a source of wonder and a place of instruction. Over the years, this relationship developed into a central metaphor in Kincaid's work, in which gardens appear as places of beauty and care, but also of domination and erasure - as microcosms of colonial history.

Kincaid will talk about the creative and destructive qualities of gardening, the act of cultivation as an expression of both love and control, and how tending the land can become an act of resistance and reparation.

Jamaica Kincaid is currently in Berlin as part of her fellowship at the American Academy.

The ticket includes admission to the exhibition.

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer and Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She holds honorary doctorates from Amherst College, Tufts University, Middlebury College and the University of the West Indies, among others. Kincaid is known for her powerful reflections on family, memory, gender roles, colonialism, her native Antigua, and gardening. She is the author of numerous award-winning and widely translated essays, short stories and novels, including At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), A Small Place (1988), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), Mr. Potter (2002), Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005), See Now Then (2013) and most recently An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (with Kara Walker, 2024). Her "Talk of the Town" columns for the New Yorker appeared in Talk Stories (2001). She is the winner of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the 2017 Dan David Prize, the 2014 American Book Award, and the 2000 Prix Femina Étranger, among many other honors. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.