The publication 'What we could have become: Reflections on queer feminist filmmaking' explores the radical potentials of care and speculative fiction in the context of queer feminist collective filmmaking. Departing from the experimental short film The Book of S of I (2020) by Malu Blume, this publication is a documentation of the film project just as much as its own artistic medium. Using a performative mode, it weaves together film stills with unreleased set photography, creating a visual narration that reflects caring and kinship through a queer feminist – and femme – lens.

With a foreword by editor Sascia Bailer, the booklet contains a transcript of the film’s narrative voice over and an essay on queer utopian care in the context of The Book of S of I and its making, both written by the artist Malu Blume. The publication concludes with a conversation between Malu Blume and their co-producers, friends and artistic collaborators Ipek Hamzaoglu, Laura Nitsch and Sophie Utikal, moderated by Sascia Bailer. In this conversation the artists and discuss the chances and challenges of collective film making in the context of producing The Book of S of I.

Malu Blume is a Berlin-based artist who works at the intersections of art, performance, film and education. In 2016 they completed a master's degree in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Malu Blume has been the co-founder and member of several collective projects on queer feminism, archival politics, friendship and collaborative knowledge production.

Ideas, utopian propositions and practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting empathically with the world around us.

This book brings together ideas and projects that seek to define a new role for design based on empathy.

As a mediator of emotions and feelings, design is presented here as a practice that takes care as its main purpose. Designers adopt sensitive, diplomatic, sometimes therapeutic functions, with the aim of connecting us with one another but also with the world around us, with other species, with soil, water and even the universe. In this book, the reader will find new ideas, utopian propositions but also practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting with the world around them. Taking food as a key medium of encounter, both between people and also with the more than human world, the designers featured in this book consciously operate in a multi-scalar realm – from the invisible microbial life that lives in our gut to the vast landscapes transformed by agricultural practices. Designs for more than one are those that take into consideration not just their immediate user or client but the many constituents inevitably impacted by any new object or action.

Edited by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben.

With written contributions by Ekin Ozbicer, Mariana Pestana, Susan Lanzoni, Naz Şahin, Billie Muraben, Sumitra Upham, FRAUD, Luigi Coppola and Vivien Sansour and Pelin Tan, Aslıhan Demirtaş, Black Athena Collective, theOtherDada, TiriLab, Counterspace, Anna Puigjaner (MAIO) with Alina Abouelenin, Aslı Uludağ, Dele Adeyemo, Young Curators Group, Eylül Şenses, Ulya Soley, Nur Horsanalı, Studio Ossidiana, Orkan Telhan + elii, Ibiye Camp, Ben Thorp Brown, Paula Gaetano Adi, Meriem Bennani, Calum Bowden, Jawa El Khash, Emmy Bacharach, Alice dos Reis, Macedo Cannat, Future Anecdotes.
 

The Department of Speculative Facts connects two seemingly contradictory approaches: Speculation which attempts to think and act beyond existing knowledge and structures, and fact-checkers in search for a solid consensus on which our reality can be built. When stretching knowledge and speculating with fiction, what sense of responsibility is needed in times of democratized opinions and fake news? Learning from the other SF—Science Fiction—we think of speculation through facts, and facts through speculation, to situate truth culturally.

The backbone of this book is an e-mail exchange between two fact-checkers from the New York Times Magazine, which we handed over to artists to re-write, re-perform, and re-design. The publication includes the original letters, workshop scripts, as well as additional texts by philosophers, journalists, writers, and artists looking at new social contracts, with which we can anchor ourselves in the present.

Department of Speculative Facts is Lietje Bauwens, Quenton Miller, Karoline Świeżyński.

Contributions by Sepake Angiama, Lietje Bauwens (DoSF), Kate Briggs, Federico Campagna, Alex Carp & Jamie Fisher (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE), Mette Edvardsen, Tristan Garcia, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Nicoline van Harskamp, Quenton Miller DoSF, Ingo Niermann, Michael Portnoy, Achal Prabhala with WIKIAFRICA, FACT FACTORIES, AFRICA CHECK, CHIMURENGA, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bob Trafford (FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE).

Design by Karoline Świeżyński

McKenzie Wark combines an autobiographical account of her relationship with Kathy Acker with her transgender reading of Acker's writing to outline Acker's philosophy of embodiment and its importance for theorizing the trans experience.

Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker.

Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview.

As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.

Former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote in the New York Times, "CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious."

The poems in AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration reach out from a (Soma)tic poetry ritual where CA flooded their body with the field recordings of recently extinct animals. Foundational here are the memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the Corona Virus pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.

Considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets, Alice Notley has amassed a body of work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic, political observation and invective, and the poem as novel. This chronological selection of her most notable work offers a delineation of her life and creative development. Formerly associated with the second generation of the New York School, Notley has become a poet with a completely distinctive voice. Grave of Light is a progression of changing forms and styles--an extensive panorama held together explicitly by the shape of the poet's times. Notley's poems challenge their subjects head-on, suffusing language with radiant truth.

Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. 

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.  

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me(1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.  

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.

Born amidst tragedy and implacable hatreds, the young Peter McCutcheon is denied his freedom, his birthright, and the fruits of his labors by cruel masters, and by a society and history which denies the truth.

THE WAGES is a monument to individual courage and to the ongoing injustices caused by the suppression of memories and the oppression of people. It is also a powerful document of America's entanglement in slavery and vicious myths of race. The wages of sin, according to the Bible, is death. Fanny Howe's novel demonstrates that the wages of hate are pain, and a cost not always borne by the perpetrator, or even the current generation.

Pourquoi faire un fanzine de musique entre filles? Pour contrer l’hypocrisie et la vacuité d’une presse dite «féminine», en réalité capitaliste et aliénante; pour réagir soit à l’insipidité d’une presse culturelle stérilisée par les discours de l’industrie, soit à la morgue de rédacteurs qui confondent authenticité et beaufitude, panache et insulte, et prennent encore la «meuf» pour une catégorie musicale.

Pour se rencontrer physiquement ou virtuellement, soulever des cailloux ensemble, échanger nos habits, éclairer les doutes autant que les évidences, se sentir moins seules. Pour se sortir un peu d’un flux digital qui nous rend malades, s’affranchir des likes, tanguer entre passé et futur (c’est quoi l’«actualité»? ça commence quand, ça finit quand?). Pour ne pas se rouler dans les formules toutes faites ou les bons sentiments, mais bâtir un truc concret, qui muscle la cervelle autant que les bras. Pour essayer de dresser des équations musique—texte—image dans sa tête, puis dans une surface rectangulaire. Et puis déconstruire des mythes, comme celui qu’il y a des gens qui peuvent écrire sur la musique et d’autres pas. Ça veut pas dire qu’on fait n’importe quoi, on se surprend même à redoubler d’une vigilance parfois épuisante: est-ce que je raconte pas trop ma vie? Est-ce qu’on voit que je fais du second degré? Est-ce qu’emploie le bon vocabulaire?

Dans ce 3e numéro de Ventoline, on déterre des reliques d’enfance, des histoires de migrations et de construction identitaire quand on est à la fois blanche et noire; on discute encore et toujours des relations entre le propre et le sale, le design et l’underground, le travail et l’amatorat; on parle de nos exigences et de ce que les autres attendent de nous; et puis parfois, forcément, on parle des relous.

Faute de temps, on n’a pas réussi à vous concocter de mots-croisés pour la plage, mais on vous souhaite quand même une agréable lecture et un été bien moelleux.

Les contributrices :

Miaux / Mia Prce (Anvers)
miaux.bandcamp.com

Hélène Marian (Paris)
https://www.helenemarian.com

Nelly Chevaillier (Paris)
instagram.com/nllchvllr

Anne Vimeux (Marseille)
http://sissi-club.com

Inès Di Folco
instagram.com/inesdifolco
rosemercieband.bandcamp.com
http://www.red-lebanese.com/index.php/music/mi-nina-ep—pira-pora/

Camille Foucou (Marseille)
instagram.com/camillefoucou

Juliette Romero
instagram.com/julietteromeroaaa

Camille Lavaud (Paris / Dordogne)
camillelavaud.com

Hélène Barbier
helenebarbier.bandcamp.com
celluloidlunch.com

Marie-Pierre Bonniol (Berlin)
studiowalter.com
julietippex.com

Victoria Palacios (Bruxelles)
instagram.com/victoriapalacios

Camille Potte (Marseille)
camillepotte.fr

Laetitia Gendre (Bruxelles)
laetitiagendre.com

DJ Marcelle (Amsterdam)
anothernicemess.com

Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of ‘Europe’ and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.

Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist’s own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote ‘European culture’ through art.

With contributions by Reza Negarestani, Laurent Thévenot, Teresa Pullano, Stephen Zepke, Neil Brenner.

Published September 2021

Originally published by Doubleday and Company in 1970, N.H. Pritchard's The Matrix was one of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page.

Praised as a "FREE souled" work by Allen Ginsberg, The Matrix feels as fresh and necessary today as when it was first published. This new facsimile edition, copublished by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, makes the book available to a new generation of readers.

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.  

Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with, indeed, our inseparability from others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.  

For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture, from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis, is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.

Originally published in English in 2003, Nicole Brossard's Museum of Bone and Water delivers sensual and provocative investigations of the human body, our physical and spiritual museums of identity and desire -- that pulse and surprise at every turn. In this collection, fingers, lips, fists, cheeks mingle in the palm trees of Dublin and Key West, the heat of Palermo and Madrid. With each dazzling turn and each "crazy" silence, Brossard speeds our breath and quickens our hearts, reminding us that poetry too is both a physical and spiritual reality.

Museum of Bone and Water, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, is recognized as a major work in the oeuvre of leading Québécoise poet, novelist, and essayist Nicole Brossard, recently honoured with the Lifetime Recognition Award by the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

This book sees the re-emergence of the seminal 1970s magazine Curtainsedited by British artist/writer, Paul Buck. 

With its early promotion of French writers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye and Edmond Jabès, Curtains’ re-appearance arrives after an exhibition at Focal Point Gallery in 2012 that was recreated from an earlier 1992 work at Cabinet Gallery around the concept of ‘disappearing’. 

The invited contributions come from thirteen artists with whom the editor has engaged over the years. In addition, Buck has returned to pull threads from the earlier editions of his magazine to explore ideas with writers encountered in the intervening years, making all appear in a consolidated grouping as a final gesture, one that refuses to disappear. 

Contributions include those by: Kathy Acker, Susan Hiller, Liane Lang, Lucy McKenzie, Richard Prince, Miroslav Tichy, Sophie von Hellermann, and many others.

The seventh book in Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers Series, is a love letter between generations of queer people. Set in New York City in 2001, we follow Phillip—a gender subversive drag king in search of grace and magic—through rich, sad, humorous language that is singularly Shelley Marlow's.

Kevin Killian writes, "I've been dying for something first rate and innovative and have found this in Marlow's writing. Her hero, Phillip/Philomena...is the most enchanting and elusive central character in a novel since Cassandra in Dodie Smith's Capture the Castle. While many have compared Marlow to the late Jane Bowles, I would agree if only there was a loving and empathetic Jane Bowles, and now there is and here is her book."

A composition for one actor and tape, or two actors. Score. 1970

Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.

Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.

Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The scripts of Romy Rüegger's performances: a constellation of texts, largely written to be spoken. The scripts as they are printed do not document the performances primarily. They are indications of spacial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies. Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping.

Romy Rüegger (born 1983, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and writer working with sound-based practices and shared listening. Her writings for performances, audio works and choreographed spaces draw on anti-racist and intersectional politics of language and memory. Recent performances, audio works and publication contributions include Synthetic Stream Plays (Kunsthalle Basel, 2018), Binary Codes as NO (Gasworks, London, 2018), “I am the Wall” (in: Grounds for Possible Music, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2018), Reina llora*, Reads (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2017), I am the Wall (Q-O2 / Performatik Festival, Brussels, 2017), History is Closed Today (Helmhaus, Zurich, 2017), J'ai everyday ma substance (in collaboration with Anna Frei, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 2017).

Published 2018

Marking a return for Laura Mulvey to questions of film theory and feminism, as well as a reconsideration of new and old film technologies, this urgent and compelling collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the power and pleasures of moving images.

Its title, Afterimages, alludes to the dislocation of time that runs through many of the films and works it discusses as well as to the way we view them. Beginning with a section on the theme of woman as spectacle, a shift in focus leads to films from across the globe, directed by women and about women, all adopting radical cinematic strategies. Mulvey goes on to consider moving image works made for art galleries, arguing that the aesthetics of cinema have persisted into this environment.

Structured in three main parts, Afterimages also features an appendix of ten frequently asked questions on her classic feminist essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which Mulvey addresses questions of spectatorship, autonomy, and identity that are crucial to our era today. 

Published Jan, 2020. 

This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Nov/Dec 2017 

With
Sandra Liaklev Andersen
Ida Arenius
DANSEatelier
Bronwyn bailey-charteris
Lauren Bakst
Anna Bontha
Oda Brekke
Chloe Chignell
Anna Fischler
Emilia Gasiorek
Ilse Ghekiere
Adriana Gheorghe
Paolo Gile
Andreas Haglund
Alice Heyward
Johanne Ib
Maia Means
Benny Olk
Rebecca Rosier
Nathalie Rozanes
Ellen Soderhult
Kottinspekionen Dans