Sun 06 October until Sun 15 December 2024 (12:00-14:00)

[Reading group] ...have ...word reading group #3

…have …word reading group is back for its third series. You’re warmly invited to join us every second Sunday 12h-14h00 from October 6 to December 15 2024. Kathy Acker once wrote “Language pre-supposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning.” In this reading group we look to language as a site of relation and communion. Following on from our previous series we question what it means to have, to hold, to let go and to be transformed by language.

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rile* , books
The Glover Group – A Los Angeles Story
The Glover Group
Nero Editions - 30.00€ -

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

e-flux Index #03
George MacBeth (ed.)
e-flux - 45.00€ -

76 contributions from an international selection of critics, artists, poets, architects, filmmakers, and theorists, published by e-flux between April–May 2024, arranged into 11 thematic chapters—ranging from the live question of cultural censorship through to the role of diagrams and notation in contemporary artistic practice.

540 pages long, this volume includes contributions from authors, artists, architects, filmmakers, poets, and theorists from many parts of the world. Ulises Carrión once declared that "In the new art every book requires a different reading"—an attitude which the Index here adopts in its approach to contemporary culture.

Contributions by Kwabena Appeaning Addo, Kimberly Alidio, Shouka Alizadeh, Corina L. Apostol, Aram, Arnavaz, Andrius Arutiunian, Robert Ashley, Goli Baharan, Stephanie Bailey, Oliver Basciano, Merve Bedir, Silvia Benedito, Pietro Bianchi, Alessandro Bosetti, Arno Brandlhuber, Nathan Brown, Boris Buden, Harry Burke, Rocio Calzado, Matevž Čelik, Adeline Chia, Ted Chiang, Canada Choate, Jace Clayton, Kim Cordóva, Ana Dana Beroš, Dasgoharan, Miri Davidson, Nuzhan Didartalab, Travis Diehl, Brian Dillon, Maria Dimitrova, Ben Eastham, Ren Ebel, Elaheh, Ludwig Engel, Future Foodscapes Research Unit, Ghoncheh Ghavami, Olaf Grawert, Boris Groys, Maddie Hampton, Negar Hatami, Jörg Heiser, Sandi Hilal, Daisy Hildyard, Juan José Santos, Nicole Kalms, Biljana Kašić, Tamta Khalvashi, Alina Kolar, Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag, Cat Kron, Agnieszka Kurant, Michał Libera, R.H. Lossin, Rômulo Moraes, Daniel Muzyczuk, Nahal Nikan, Tausif Noor, Bahar Noorizadeh, Alice Notley, Joe Osae-Addo, Parva, Octave Perrault, Alessandro Petti, Andreas Petrossiants, Filipa Ramos, Jacques Rancière, Robida, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Mika Savela, Debora Silverman, Daniel Spaulding, Jonas Staal, Kerstin Stakemeier, Ben Vida, Anthony Vidler, McKenzie Wark, Katrina Wiberg, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Jenny Wu, Osman Can Yerebakan, Vivian Ziherl.

Ticking Stripe
Spencer Gerhardt
Blank Forms - 22.00€ -

A new collection of writings by the composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt, considering among other topics the rich points of contact between minimalist musical aesthetics and intuitionistic mathematics.

Noted composer and mathematician Spencer Gerhardt presents Ticking Stripe, a groundbreaking collection of essays linking notions of continuity and construction across the boundaries of math, art, music and philosophy. Gerhardt offers new, and deeply informed interpretations of the 1960s New York avant-garde, viewed through the lens of trailblazing artists such as La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Catherine Christer Hennix, Henry Flynt and Tony Conrad.

Ticking Stripe pairs the spirit of L. E. J. Brouwer—a mathematician who brilliantly, and controversially, sought to reconstruct the continuum in his own philosophical terms called intuitionism—with the ambitions of pioneering minimalists who combined continued constructions, idealized processes of introspection, and conceptual world-building with a host of philosophical, scientific, and spiritual concerns. Informed by his own work as a professional mathematician and composer, Gerhardt explores the depths of these disparate traditions, finding unlikely areas of commonality. Spanning over two decades, these essays feature rich historical explorations of minimalist music, writing on contemporary art, and work in logic and algebraic groups, all approached with rare clarity and technical aplomb.

Spencer Gerhardt is a composer and mathematician. His music engages constructive, introspective and romantic traditions. Gerhardt has written solo piano music, piano based songs, and works of minimalism. He studied raga with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, piano performance with Sung-Hwa Park, and has collaborated with artists such as Thomas Ankersmit and Charles Curtis.

Sweat Shame Etc.
Cally Spooner
Lenz Press - 40.00€ -

Across objects, writing, sound and choreography, British artist Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. This volume surveys her artistic output of the last five years.

Sweat Shame Etc. includes a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2018-2019.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Edited by Alison Coplan and Laura McLean-Ferris.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner.

Film Undone – Elements of a Latent Cinema
Philip Widmann (ed.)
Archive Books - 25.00€ -

Film Undone presents contributions introducing unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time.

These tentative and careful probes dedicated to singular projects reflect the importance of primary materials before and beyond the film. Bringing them together as Elements of a Latent Cinema opens a space to consider cases from various political geographies and historical moments in relation. Latency prompts to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema than under deficit-centred categories such as failure, loss, or incompletion. It marks a sustained potentiality for things to change their condition, to affect us and set us in motion.

Contributions by Alejandro Alvarado, Carmen Amengual, Annabelle Aventurin, Alia Ayman, Concha Barquero, Petra Belc, Uliana Bychenkova, George Clark, Greg de Cuir Jr, Shai Heredia, Tobias Hering, Tom Holert, Katie Kirkland, Olexii Kuchanskyi, Brigitta Kuster, Dhianita Kusuma Pertiwi, Léa Morin, Tara Najd Ahmadi, Ojoboca, Uriel Orlow, Volker Pantenburg, Lisabona Rahman, Mathilde Rouxel, Bunga Siagian, Oleksandr Teliuk, Elena Vogman, Akbar Yumni

Breaking Cinema – Experimental Film 2010-2023
Cauleen Smith
Mousse Publishing - 18.00€ -

A significant contribution to the understanding of the work of artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, by art historian Romi Crawford, who analyzes how Smith recastsfilm history, in a pivotal period of her career.

Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Cauleen Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film, and makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. The book Breaking Cinema. Experimental Film 2010–2023 adds to the growing scholarship on Cauleen Smith's work, as art historian Romi Crawford elucidates a critical phase of the artist's career and how Smith recasts film history in the context of the artistic and cultural ferment of Chicago's South Side.

Cauleen Smith (born 1967 in Riverside, CA) is an American filmmaker and artist. Her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction. Through immersive installations, moving-image works, sculpted objects, and textiles, she engages with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, real and speculative utopias, and, in her words, "the everyday possibilities of the imagination."

Mille Feuilles
Ingo Giezendanner
Nieves - 48.00€ -

Ingo Giezendanner's wild herbarium.

Density in the foliage, branching of the tree, structure in the bark: this book is entirely dedicated to organic, wild-growing greenery, mostly in black and white, but patterns emerge, the leaves become a frenzy, and grimaces from the thicket smile at us. The volume is deliberately overwhelming, making it impossible to get an overview. Rather this thick paperback serves as a reference for untamable, rampant, sprawling kraut.

Since 1998, Ingo Giezendanner, alias GRRRR, has been documenting the urban spaces in which he has travelled and lived. Apart from his native city of Zurich, his travels have taken him to diverse cities from New York and New Orleans to Cairo, Nairobi, Karachi and Colombo. Everywhere he travels, he captures his surroundings on location with pen on paper. His drawings have been presented in numerous magazines, books and animated films as well as in spacious installations and wallpaintings.

Not a Force of Nature
Amy De'Ath
Futurepoem - 21.00€ -

If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet's surface, if "words do cleave the producer from the land," then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De'Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy's poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what's different? "Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi," or "everything…that you want from women and gays." Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. "Behold me I'm you now," Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed. — Kay Gabriel

Not a Force of Nature's expertly crafted poems explore the catastrophe we live among and speak through. They form a sort of feminist manifesto addressed to all forms of resistance. But also: here are love sonnets! This book is angrily precise and always a lot of fun. "No, you're a Canadianist!" — Kevin Davies

Not a Force of Nature is the kind of book that becomes possible only after rejecting the "we" evoked so often in contemporary literary culture—sometimes said to need poetry now more than ever, sometimes called community. Amy De'Ath's motley vision of solidarity, of "actual emboldened people," is way weirder, more lively, and possible. Nor do these poems content themselves, like the ghost of Marxist theory past, with pointing towards the contradictions that surround them. Do you remember email? Sonnets? Not a Force of Nature is like that, thrashing inside generic forms and always coming next: after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, after Jane's abortion service, after the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, after Creeley, after Raworth, after Mayer, after the Xenofeminist Manifesto, after Pluto enters Aquarius. "There are still tactics like this roaming free," De'Ath writes. There are still these fervent lyric parries. Be with Not a Force of Nature now. — Stephanie Young

Through slips of verbal acuity, Amy De'Ath scrapes her way out of determinism to a world "made by hands," where our material relations are ours to make and break. History is long and history is short. History is translucent. De'Ath presents the Ferris wheel of capitalist production, where the subject lives once as worker, twice as commodity. Here, in these "concrete trousers," is a "totally liberated" working class poem turning everything into nothing as praxis. — Anahita Jamali Rad

The Dogs
Noah Ross
Krupskaya Books - 21.00€ -

In Noah Ross's new book THE DOGS, Ross opens the question of authority and possession in what he deems an illicit act of translation. THE DOGS may begin with Herve Guibert's Les Chiens, but through multiple reiterations of translation, Guibert's text ultimately meets Ross to celebrate, among other sources, Marie de France, Teen Wolf, Auden, and Dom Orejudos in establishing a unique pack of hungry werewolves. You know what happens when werewolves get together: the play can get a little rough. THE DOGS empowers these snarls and yips, growls and howls, on the level of the sentence in translation as much as the embodied erotogenic zones of the body.

Comeback Death
Jennifer Soong
Krupskaya Books - 21.00€ -

Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling.

"In Comeback Death, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."—Thom Donovan

Psalmist Kaput
Cloak (eds.)
Cloak - 15.00€ -

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling
Kathleen Fraser
Apogee Press - 16.00€ -

"Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling is consummate masterwork by a singuarly perceptive and articulate poet. Deceptively quiet in manner, its intimate foci and tone make clear the ground of our contemporary lives, our 'being together' despite the distances of isolating thought. I love Kathleen Fraser's extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too"—Robert Creeley.

"Here is a language of poetry that recognizes, beyond its intimacies, the intellectual and elusively sensate aspects of visual and literary aesthetic connection"—Carla Harryman.

Leslie Scalapino with Michael Cross – Interview & Essay
Leslie Scalapino, Michael Cross
Further Other Book Works - 16.00€ -

Edited and introduced by Michael Cross, this book features an interview Cross conducted with Leslie Scalapino from 2007-2010, as well as Scalapino’s “Poetics” essay, both published here for the first time. 62 pages, side stapled. Cover art by Amy Evans McClure. Covers RISO printed by Aaron Cohick.

From Michael Cross’s introduction to this volume:

"I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets."

Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets
Omar Berrada, Sarah Riggs (eds.)
Litmus Press - 26.00€ -

Another Room to Live In is an archive of encounter: a multilingual conversation between fifteen poet-translators, connected through friendship, correspondence, and cross-diasporic gatherings. With work in English, Arabic, and French, the collection moves beyond both language and nation-state, investing instead in transcontinental dreamspaces. Here, translation practices collaboratively transform the poems and reflect the poets’ own experiences of “living” in multiple languages. Complicating any flat conception of identity, the poems presented here seek to revisit and challenge foundational narratives, to rework mythologies, and to do all this through a cross-generational process of translation as poetic communion.

Contributors include: Etel Adnan, Hoda Adra, Sinan Antoon, Mirene Arsanios, Omar Berrada, Sara Elkamel, Safaa Fathy, Soukaina Habiballah, Marilyn Hacker, Golan Haji, Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Pierre Joris, Mona Kareem, Souad Labbize, Rachida Madani, Alisha Mascarenhas, Iman Mersal, Aya Nabih, Sarah Riggs, Yasmine Seale, Cole Swensen, Habib Tengour, and Sam Wilder.

That They Were at the Beach
Leslie Scalapino
Litmus Press - 16.00€ -

For this collection of poems and prose, Leslie Scalapino has gathered four sequences into what she calls an “aeolotropic series.” The poems reflect each other like crystals and change like highly polished glass illuminated by a shifting light. They follow the mind from thought and observation to afterthought, reflection, and obsession.

Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, and essays, including numerous collaborations with artists, writers, and dancers. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.

The Cheap-Eaters
Thomas Bernhard | Douglas Robertson (translator)
Spurl Editions - 20.00€ -

The cheap-eaters have been eating at the Vienna Public Kitchen for years, from Monday to Friday, and true to their name, always the cheapest meals. They become the focus of Koller’s scientific attention when he deviates one day from his usual path through the park, leading him to come upon the cheap-eaters and to realize that they must be the focal piece of his years-long, unwritten study of physiognomy. The narrator, a former school friend of Koller’s, tells of his relationship with Koller in a single unbroken paragraph that is both dizzying and absorbing. In Koller, the narrator observes a “gradually ever-growing and utterly exclusive interest in thought . . . . We can get close to such a person, but if we come into contact with him we will be repelled.” Written in Bernhard’s hyperbolic, darkly comic style, The Cheap-Eaters is a study of the limits of language and thought.

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most important and unique writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1931, Bernhard published numerous novels and autobiographical writings, as well as short stories, plays, and poetry, including The Loser and Extinction. Many of his prose works feature complex narrative structures and obsessive, misanthropic monologues. After years of chronic lung illness, Bernhard died in Austria in 1989.

Douglas Robertson is a translator based in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied British and American Literature at the New College of Florida and Johns Hopkins University. He has translated works from German into English by authors including E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Christian Morgenstern, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck, and he has studied Thomas Bernhard’s work for over ten years. The Cheap-Eaters is his first book-length published translation.

Understanding Molecular Typography
Woody Leslie, H.F. Henderson
Ugly Duckling Press - 24.00€ -

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

The TV Sutras
Dodie Bellamy
Ugly Duckling Press - 24.00€ -

Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.

Fantasy
Ben Fama
Ugly Duckling Press - 18.00€ -

Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.

Notes on Conceptualisms
Robert Fitterman, Vanessa Place
Ugly Duckling Press - 17.00€ -

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate.

In Commemoration of the Visit
Kathleen Fraser, Robert Glück
Further Other Book Works - 20.00€ -

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold
Delaine Le Bas
Archivist Addendum - 47.00€ -

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

Eecchhooeess
N.H. Pritchard
DABA - 24.00€ -

American poet Norman H. Pritchard's second and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was originally published in 1971 by New York University Press. Pritchard's writing is visually and typographically unconventional. His methodical arrangements of letters and words disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion, modulating the speeds of reading and looking by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects. His manipulation of text and codex resembles that of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions from which literary history has mostly excluded him. Pritchard also worked with sound, and his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places, on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)—make themselves heard on the page.

EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard's formal and conceptual sensibilities, and provides an entryway into the work of a poet whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition. DABA's publication of EECCHHOOEESS is unabridged and closely reproduces the design of the original 1971 volume.  

Norman H. Pritchard (1939-96) was affiliated with the Umbra group, a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement. He taught writing at the New School for Social Research and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971). His work was anthologized in publications including The New Black Poetry (1969), In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969), Dices or Black Bones: Black Voices of the Seventies (1970), Ishmael Reed's 19 Necromancers from Now (1970), Text-Sound Texts (1980) and others.

Fugitive Feminism
Akwugo Emejulu
Silver Press - 17.00€ -

Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?

This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

tendentious | neo-semantics
Lily Greenham
Bricks from the Kiln - 12.00€ -

Transcribed from previously unpublished text-sound transcripts, the edition also brings together selections from Greenham’s aphorisms and 50 words-stories and a fragmentary pre / post-script from documents in the Lily Greenham Archive, and is accompanied by an epistolary insert from sound poet Larry Wendt.

Greenham was an artist / composer / writer / performer and inventor of the term ‘lingual music’. This launch is part of a two-day symposium that coincides with the exhibition ‘Lily Greenham: An Art of Living’ at the Badischer Kunstverein, the first large-scale retrospective of her work.

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin
Rachel Garfield and Henry K Miller (eds.)
LUX, London - 25.00€ -

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin is the culmination of a three year research project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, at the University of Reading where his archive is housed. The book is a unique visual distillation of Dwoskin’s life and times, with hundreds of never-seen-before images taken from his archive, and texts by among others Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, and Dwoskin himself.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’ and his work was a major influence on her influential work on the male gaze in cinema. From the mid-1970s, he focused his camera upon his own body, afflicted by polio during childhood, in such films as Behindert (1974) and Outside In (1981).

Oostende
Martín Zícari
Poesía Paripé - 23.00€ -

Oostende is a book about displacement and the sometimes-overwhelming internal monologue we live with. In between poetry, diary and novel, the book reflects on Zicari’s life in Buenos Aires and Belgium, as he navigates work fragility, friendship, sex and love, migration and the fiction laying behind everyday actions and life changing decisions.

Zícari's portrayal of his private life is far from the domain of the concrete, instead he ventures into the uncontrollable production of fantasies that sustain his inner discourse. It is around this dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, the tension between the experienced and the illusion, that Martín Zícari builds a book sustained in orality and proximity.

Martín Zícari, PhD, is a writer and producer based in Brussels. He has published poetry collections such as "Oostende" (Paripé Books, Madrid, 2023), "Del Príncipe Azul al Hombre Invisible en una Semana" (Editorial Municipal de Rosario, Argentina, 2018), and "Pequellpu" (LUMA Foundation, Switzerland, 2015), as well as the short novel "Scalabritney" (Entropia, Argentina, 2014), among others. His research has been featured in scientific journals such as Performance Research, Memory Studies, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

A Very Large Array: Selected Poems
Jena Osman
DABA - 35.00€ -

Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

Sitt Marie Rose
Etel Adnan
Litmus Press - 17.00€ -

Sitt Marie Rose is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the civil war in Lebanon. Already a classic of war literature, this extraordinary novel won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into six languages. Sitt Marie Rose is part of Comparative Literature, World Literature, Women’s Studies and Middle East Studies curricula at more than thirty universities and colleges in the U.S.

Translated by Georgina Kleege.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She is a celebrated writer, essayist, and playwright, and is the author of more than twenty books in all these disciplines. Her work as a whole is a faithful record of the times and places she has lived in Beirut, Paris, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. At least eighteen works by Adnan have been published in English. They include Sitt Marie Rose (Post-Apollo Press, 1982); The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry; Premonition (Kelsey Street Press, 2014); Surge (Nightboat Books, 2018); Time (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Best Translated Book Award; and Shifting the Silence (Nightboat Books, 2020). In 2021, Litmus Press published a second edition of Journey to Mount Tamalpais (originally published by The Post-Apollo Press), which included nine new ink drawings by Adnan. Her paintings, described by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith as "stubbornly radiant abstractions," have been widely exhibited. Spanning media and genres, Adnan's writings have led to numerous collaborations with artists and musicians, including the French part of CIVIL warS, a multi-language opera by American stage director Robert Wilson, performed in Lyon and Bobigny in 1985. In 2014 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, France's highest cultural honor, by the French Government. She died in Paris, in 2021.

Georgina Kleege is an internationally known writer and disability studies scholar. Her collection of personal essays, Sight Unseen (1999) is a classic in the field of disability studies. Kleege’s latest book, More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art. Kleege joined the English department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2003 where in addition to teaching creative writing classes she teaches courses on representations of disability in literature, and disability memoir. Kleege is also the author of Home for the Summer (The Post-Apollo Press, 1989).

Schismatics
Goda Palekaite
LAPAS - 20.00€ -

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition
Judy Grahn
Sinister Wisdom - 23.00€ -

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Morceaux choisis – A Monograph
Saâdane Afif
Bom Dia Books - 48.00€ -

Morceaux choisis is the first seminal overview of Saâdane Afif's artistic practices. The publication features 48 exhibitions or performances organized in 28 separate sections, covering a period of 14 years.
Starting with Melancholic Beat at Museum Folkwang, Essen in 2004 and leading up to the recent exhibition Musiques pour tuyauterie, at mor charpentier, Paris in 2018, the monograph considers the format of the exhibition as Saâdane Afif's medium, through which his work takes form and can be read. 

Each one of the figuring exhibitions form an individual booklet: the pages with full color reproductions of the individual works and installation views are inserted within four additional pages providing the exhibition's title, description, details and captions. 
These 28 booklets form the body of the publication. The exhibition texts have been written by Lily Matras and Yasmine d'O. They are accompanied by an interview of Saâdane Afif by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, two critical texts by Zoë Gray and Jörn Schafaff, an index of the exhibited works and an index of Afif 's released books and records.

Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects. These creations, of uncertain status, oscillate between function and symbol, between art and design, and provoke shifts of meaning that engage a reflection on today's industrial society.

Ornamental Portal
Rietlanden Women’s Office
The Palace of Typographic Masonry - 16.00€ -

The Palace of Typographic Masonry is an (imaginary) institute for the splendour and variety of visual languages. The Ornamental Portal informs the ornamental attitude of Rietlanden Women’s Office, the collective that designed this folding sheet for Von Wersin’s Kitchen. On the backside ‘The Redemptive Qualities Of Ornament’, a text by Dirk Vis, is printed. This iris printed sheet is send in a specific envelope depicting and describing the updated collection of Von Wersin's Kitchen.

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