Between a reader, an artist’s book, a project documentation and a catalogue, it might recall a pamphlet, a roadmap, or a recipe book that doesn’t tell you what to do. It is a book that gets mis-shelved.

Shelf documents emerges out of the project second shelf (second-shelf.org), a collaborative book acquisition project initiated by artist Heide Hinrichs in 2018 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, with a group of advisors. They integrated 223 new titles by nonbinary, women and queer artists as well as artists of colour in art libraries as a way to fill gaps, to amplify voices, to seek out the self-initiated and the overlooked. In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion, spanning practices that range from personal bookshelves and the libraries of art schools and universities, to those of spontaneous collectives and the ones associated with major museums.

In this session, contributors to shelf documents will unfold different modes of listening and voicing, including through Hinrichs’ drawing practice that gave shape to Inscriptions, a series of drawings presented in Risquons-Tout. Participants are invited to reflect and remake their own practices.

There can never be enough queer spaces, and the club is as good a place as any to begin an exploration. For generations, the club has been a space of legend, gossip, hearsay, and queer history, a place to gather and build community, to feel safe and experiment. The editors of ‘Girls Like Us’ decided to make a guest-edited issue centred around queer architecture back in 2019, long before the pandemic hit. They found the Swedish queer art and architecture collective MYCKET to fill this role, and later also realised how much club spaces were missed in pandemic times. Because, missing clubbing is one thing, but not being able to dance is something else entirely.

Cinquième édition de la série des lecteurs.

Recherches du groupe EAAPES initié par Clara Pacotte et Charlotte Houette autour des questions queer et de féminismes dans la littérature de science-fiction/fiction spéculative.

Contient des traductions de nouvelles de plusieurs autriX tirées du recueil Sisters of the Revolution publié par Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, des interviews, des textes originaux, des articles plus contemporains, des extraits de fictions déjà publiées.

Les textes en langue étrangère sont tous traduits en français.

Avec les contributions de Alexia Foubert, Antoine Trapp, Ariane Sirota, Barbara Sirieix, Camille Pageard, Dora Diamant, Hélène Baril, Laetitia Paviani, Loraine Furter, Louise Truc, Luz De Amor, Mélodie Simonnet, Mirion Malle, Rosanna Puyol, Roxanne Maillet, Théo Robine Langlois.

Pub. dec 2018

Recherches du groupe EAAPES initié par Clara Pacotte et Charlotte Houette autour des questions queer et de féminismes dans la littérature de science-fiction/fiction spéculative.

Contient des traductions des essais de Joanna Russ du recueil To Write Like A Woman, des interviews à la Wiscon, des textes originaux, des articles plus contemporains, des extraits de fictions déjà publiées.

Les textes en langue étrangère sont tous traduits en français.

Avec les contributions de Adèle Iris, Adèle Rolland, Maïwenn Le Mouée, Esmé Planchon, Nana Benamer, Josèfa Ntjam, FLG.

Pub. 2018

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

CONTENTS

Impending Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Cruises to Nowhere
Covid-19 stricken Ships
Ghost Ships drifting on the Mediterranean

Suspended Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Le Corbusier Confined
Venice, Lazaretto and Black Death

Confined Spaces by Dimitra Kondylatou
Religious versus Medical Approaches to the Plague
Public Health and Public Order
Architectures of Control
The Lazaretto at Syros

Confinement and Totalitarianism, Famine in Occupied Syros
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Panic Room. Waiting Room. Island.
by Hulya Ertas

Nowhere in Cycladic culture has love been defined in a singular all-encompassing manner. Forces of attraction, affection, connection, and relation were ascribed in a plurality of ways. Through symposia in Delos, the tax haven of antiquity, 17th-century transactions of love involving pirates, slaves, and Mykonians; naturist communities reliving sexual freedom in the 1960-70s and 21st-century tourists quest in search of love, free or paid; this book gathers fragments of expressions of affection across Mykonos island. Mykonos has long defined itself as a self-ruling place far away from realities lived elsewhere.

CONTENTS

Transactions of Love
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

To Watch every Sunset as if it was the Last One
by Juan Duque

Faces of Love
by Denis Maksimov

Professional Hugs
by Dimitra Kondylatou

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.

CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

What can a reclining marble sculpture, conceived through a myth in Greek antiquity, tell us today about the fluidity of our gender construction? What has been the role of aesthetic and historical canons in the construction of the female and male genders? Is ‘the sleeping Hermaphrodite’ really asleep? Or has she/he been induced to a long lethargic state, punished and confined by the history of gender normalization?

CONTENTS

My Trans Body is an Empty House
by Paul B. Preciado

Queering Mythology for Alternative Futures:
Athena and Dionysus
by Denis Maksimov

Touching the Difference
by Juan Duque

The transformation of Hermaphroditus
by Juan Duque

Two Types of Representations of Hermaphroditus:

The Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Roman type
by Juan Duque

Hermaphroditos Anasyromenos
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk ofYes, But Is It Edible? is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); and in landscapes produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship.

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

Yes, But Is It Edible? is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Will Holder and Alex Waterman that a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agape (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); and The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson; Sternberg Press, 2012).

Including essays about Madeline Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Laure Prouvost, Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong, Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, Susan Sontag’s filmmaking career, Storm De Hirsch, Zia Anger, Ashley Connor, Bruce LaBruce, Pina Bausch/Chantal Akerman, Magdalena Montezuma, Rebecca Horn, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Zhu Shengze, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Maya Da-Rin, Camila Freitas, Gong Li

An in-depth Afro-Brazilian roundtable with Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Janaina Oliveira, Everlane Moraes and Kênia Freitas; sections on Kira Muratova and Anne Charlotte Robertson; essays on subtitles, diffractive cinemas, ecocriticism/the anthropocene, literary adaptations, intimacy coordinators, strike on film, representing the internet,

Interviews with Betzy Bromberg, Zia Anger & Ashley Connor, Brett Story, Amandine Gay, Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Therese Henningsen

Experimental criticism from Kathryn Scanlan, Jen Calleja and Elissa Suh.

An English translation of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Repetition, previously out of print for a quarter of a century.

“In Repetition, Handke allows the peculiar light which illuminates the space under a leafy canopy or a tent canvas to glisten between words, placed here with astounding caution and precision; in doing so, he succeeds in making the text into a sort of refuge amid the arid lands which, even in the culture industry, grow larger day by day.” —W. G. Sebald

“In his earliest work … Handke found a way of conveying a state of mind … where words seem to come between you and the world, where nothing coheres or appears natural, and from the vantage-point of which the ease with which other people talk and go about their business seems deeply suspicious. But just as Kafka felt there were moments when, miraculously, a written sentence – even one written by himself – seemed full light, seemed to fill its own space and establish its own rhythm, and when even the whole story seemed mysteriously to stand as solidly in the world as a tree or a rock, so it has been with Handke. He has, in his later work, appeared to make a conscious effort to escape from the debilitating awareness of his own lack of authority or authenticity, and tried to write as though somehow the story were already written, had, in a sense, always been there… Repetition is the triumphant climax of his career so far…

What saves the book from the sort of sentimentality we find in John Berger’s recent work is first of all Handke’s uncanny ability to convey what it is this urge for pattern has to overcome, and secondly, his extraordinary attention to detail, historical, geographical, botanical, and linguistic. (No review can possibly convey the richness of Filip’s meditation on his brother’s two books, or Handke’s magical way with images.)

His narrative … is one of the most dignified and moving evocations I have ever read of what it means to be alive, to walk upon this earth.” —Gabriel Josipovici

This volume gathers all of Christopher Middleton’s Hölderlin translations, comprising thirty-one poems and fourteen letters. With an introduction, notes, and four essays on (translating) Hölderlin’s poetry.

“Christopher Middleton is an extraordinary translator, bringing his fine poet’s ear and inventiveness to the task. In addition to the brilliant versions, this volume offers Middleton’s essays on the poet and a selection from Hölderlin’s letters – a great gift to us all.” —Rosmarie Waldrop

'To discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores' is a collection of texts exploring the score as a choreographic tool for writing.

Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public.

The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation, All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

"The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

The Interjection Calendar is an on and offline project, devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. The PDF can be downloaded for free and there are 12 releases per year. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. 

Contributors: Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. She currently works as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery (Sheffield) and is the founder and curator of TMT Projects - a contemporary arts platform based in Luton Town. 

vei darling is a first generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist and activist, who grew up in the D(M)V. vei moved to New York City when she was 17, and began an intense path of spiritual reconfiguration. vei positions herself within social justice and humanitarianism, whilst being infused with magick and spirituality. Her ultimate desire is to subvert the current paradigm in lieu of one that respects and reflects life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Caspar Heinemann is a writer, artist and poet. Their interests include critical occultism, gay biosemiotics and countercultural mythologies. Some of the time they teach and read things at institutions, a lot of the time they cook potatoes in different shapes and listen to Alan Watts lectures. They were born in London, UK, roughly 2.5 months after the release of Green Day’s seminal album Dookie. 

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). He studied at Howard University, Cave Canem, and California Institute of the Arts. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family just west of Minneapolis and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Douglaskearney.com 

Cara Levine - with: Khadija Tarver, Christine Wong Yap, Eliza Myrie, Greg Boyle, Rodney Lu- cas, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ashley Stull Meyers, Sidony O’neal, Kambui Olujimi Jadelynn Stahl, Amanda Eicher, Jessica Angima, Faye Gleisser, Quenton Baker, Sam Aranke, Jade Thacker, Ekaette Ekong, Christopher Johnson, Marvin K White, Kemi Adeyemi, Constance Hockaday, Kate Johnson, Bayete Ross-Smith, Leila Weefur, Kirat Randhawa, Angela Hennessy, Elizabeth Dorbad, Prophet Walker, Shamell Bell, Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Ann Lewis. Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA and is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. 

Daisy Parris was born in Kent, 1993, and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014. She currently lives and works in South London. Daisy Parris’ work raises questions about identity politics as well as the limits of what it means to be human. By using various formats such as portraiture, roomscapes and text, Parris focuses on identity struggles as well as the worry, guilt, numbness and the violent encounters of everyday existence. 

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xeno-femme sci /fantasy, cursed video games, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. 

James Lawrence Slattery is an artist, critic and academic living and working in London. They hold an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a masters in Film Aesthetics from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 

Gjergji Shkurti is a New York based author. His writing explores architecture as fiction and incorporates a filmic imagination. The writing stems from a yearning to push history forward. 

Chanel Vegas is an artist who works in London. She writes poetry, makes paintings, and regularly performs as part of her work. Chanel graduated from Goldsmiths in 2017 and was the first student to be the recipient of the university’s Artist Award. 

Punch Viratmalee currently lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Viratmalee graduated Chulalongkorn University in 2015 with a BA in Communication Design. She previously worked at a commercial gallery in Bangkok and is now working as a curatorial assistant for the first Thailand Biennale. She also writes. 

The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente under which they write criticism an occasionally curate. The White Pube is based at thewhitepube. com and on Twitter and Instagram as @thewhitepube.

A conversation about performance, genre and cinema in the subversive work of Brice Dellsperger.

In this conversation between Dellsperger and Marie-France Rafael, following current (post)gender discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual) identity as products of a cultural construction informed by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet do not depict a preexisting sexuality but establish an image of it and its (normative) framework. Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he, starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies for subjectivity.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Marie-France Rafael (born 19984 in Munich) is a tenure-track professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She holds a PhD in art history; she studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. She is notably the author of Reisen im Imaginativ: Künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Travel in the Imaginary: Artistic Situations and Displays, 2017) and Ari Benjamin Meyers: Music on Display (2016).

Published Oct 2020.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.

Since its founding as a cultural studies group in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective has experimented with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of collective study at the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor. This pamphlet is a collaboratively authored epistolary essay that narrates the discourse behind the development of KUNCI’s School of Improper Education, an initiative that posits studying together as a tactical approach to creating the conditions for social movement. Founded in 2016, The School of Improper Education is an avenue through which unlearning can be practiced, where unknowingness can be transformed into a series of productive tools for understanding the contemporary social ecosystem and articulating the resourcefulness of an independent art and cultural organization.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.

KUNCI Study Forum & Collective experiments with methods of producing and sharing knowledge through acts of studying together at the intersections between affective, manual, and intellectual labor. Since its founding in 1999 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, KUNCI has been continuously transforming its structure, ways, and medium of working. Initially formed as a cultural studies study group, at present KUNCI’s practices emphasize collectivizing study by way of space-making, discussion, research, publishing, and school-organizing. KUNCI traverses and connects institutional, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. KUNCI’S membership is informal and based on friendship, as well as principles of self-organization and collaboration.

Bad Advisors compiles recent texts with pictures of flowers from the street and public gardens taken in Paris during spring 2017. Mourning is an empty box with an excessive syntax. A rose does not allude to anything except its own existence. But you feel, brushing within its range, a bit more complete, which means the sensation is an apparition from nothing. The rose is an empty box with an excessive syntax. English Landscapes contains a series of white-on-black i-phone touch drawings of hay bales; a circular form that replicates across UK agricultural zones in late summer. The books are a pair.

This book is part of the www.anywhereoutofthebook.com series

咸濕 (Salty Wet) - an anti-travelogue essay on distance and desire within and without Hong Kong

“There is no Hong Kong anymore.” These four words have been on the lips of my colleagues, friends and family. Even if you have never been, every Chinatown is a facsimile of Hong Kong. The city’s specter also lives in pop culture, movies and cantopop and video games, and in these projections, we live its simulacrum. In history, dead cities have their morbid enigma and mythology from Pompeii to Rome. But if I could find coherence in living through political decay, outside of the frameworks of news journalism or historiography, then perhaps I would be able to find a more human way to mourn Hong Kong."

T▇▇ 謝▇ is an independent film producer based between Hong Kong and New York and the founder of Speculative Place. She was the Executive Producer of Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer’s feature debut film Empty Metal, and the forthcoming documentary film, Ancestors in the Archives, directed by Adam and Zack Khalil. 謝 is pronounced SHä (as in Shanghainese).