Erica Scourti

The Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage gathers together new kinds of writing about ‘vibes’, those often unspoken energies of desire and aversion that move between people, palpable but traceless, hard to prove. The messages sent by your gut that you can’t always interpret, beyond an urge. What is intangible – vibes, feelings and reflexive responses like blushes, fidgets, slumps in posture, fluctuations in voice – is now targeted by invasive technologies of affective measurement. How can writing resist this regime of quantification? 

With an introduction by Maria Fusco, contributions and new work by CAConrad, Mel Y. Chen, Adam Gallagher, Alexandrina Hemsley, Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Natasha Papadopoulou, Naomi Pearce, Parsa Sanjana Sajid, Patrick Staff, Daniella Valz Gen, and Hypatia Vourloumis. This issue’s archive is dedicated to Katerina Gogou. 

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based mostly in London, whose work explores biographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance of subjectivity. Her writing has been published in Spells, Ignota (2018) and Fiction as Method, Sternberg (2017), among others.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

Care is a matter of responsibility for human and nonhuman allies, an ecological network. Care is an imperative, and acting with care approaches the world beyond selfhood. ON CARE, an aggregate of voices, discusses the politics of caring, support, and the role of welfare in an increasingly neoliberal society. It questions who is seen as worthy of care, whose narratives are given attention, and whose lives are overlooked in a complex web of assemblages: conceptions of medical authority, the co-option of self-care in political rhetoric, care as a commodity in the hospitality industry, intergenerational intimacy, sexecology; care as utopian and care as transactional. ON CARE maps a constellation of perspectives, as testaments, fictions, and essays, addressing the relation between good health, interdependence, and the ethics of (self)care. 

Contributors: Tom Allen, Uma Breakdown, Alice Butler, Oisín Byrne, Julia Calver, Jamie Crewe, Juliette Desorgues, Rachel Genn, Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, Laura González, Holly Graham, Helen Hester, Justin Hogg, Juliet Jacques, Mati Jhurry & Rebecca Jagoe,  Juliet Johnson, Sophie Jung, Daisy Lafarge, Elisabeth Lebovici, Rebecca Lennon, Rona Lorimer, Katharina Ludwig, Mira Mattar, Martina Mullaney, Cinzia Mutigli, Carolina Ongaro, Molly Palmer, Roy Claire Potter, Nat Raha, Helena Reckitt, Ruiz Stephinson, Erica Scourti, Victoria Sin, Himali Singh Soin & Tyler Rai, Miguel Soto Karlovic,  Isabella Streffen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Maija Timonen, Lynn Turner, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Daniella Valz Gen, Nina Wakeford, Alberta Whittle 

Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

With Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh.