Moyra Davey

The 9th HOOT pops up for the winter 2022-23, but the conception of this issue started well over a year ago at our beloved Plage Avant (Traduttore, traditore’s studio, Marseille). 

We met Sophie T. Lvoff at many openings and art related events in Marseille these last few years, having a practice that appears mainly as photography, Gufo got curious about all the processes that she uses which involve sound, installation, writing… and more. She welcomed us in her studio of the city of Marseille where she recently settled.

We found out about the “trompe-l’œil” of this iconic checkered table, witnessed the installations of translucid and colored objects evolving on the sunny wall, and looked through her photographic chamber it’s called a large-format camera, but this is funny… For this issue, Sophie suggested to interview another artist, Moyra Davey, who also works in photography and writing, and appeared to have shared experiences too.

The topics of everyday life, intimacy that images embody in both their works, take another dimension as soon as their thoughts, voices and writing expand and express the entirety of their gestures.

This issue is the first interview between two native English-speaking artists, who have ties to the French language from childhood.

The penpals are the main characters of that encounter where we are very welcome to join in their very generous conversations. This is only an excerpt of a long and well referenced correspondence.

Edition on Moyra Davey's film Wedding loop, in which a wedding party is being reflected through the work of 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Design by Will Holder

Over the past 40 years, Canadian artist Moyra Davey (born 1958) has perfected a unique synthesis of photography, film and text to critically engage with the past, present and future of the world around her. Based on Davey's eponymous 2019 film, I Confess unites three main sources in a chronicle of late 20th-century Quebec, shaped by themes of race, poverty, language and nationalism. Using American writer James Baldwin's 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, Davey's film also focuses on the life and work of Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux.

Published to accompany the exhibition Moyra Davey: The Faithful at the National Gallery of Canada, this deeply personal and highly political book seeks to examine an unresolved chapter of Québécois history from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective that draws attention to contemporary issues of separatism, while reflecting the artist's understanding of photography and text as unique corollaries. This publication features writings by the artist, Dalie Giroux and National Gallery of Canada's Associate Curator Andrea Kunard, and a poster insert.

Published September 2020. 

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter, with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book, and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking.

While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others, in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

Published May 2020.

Moyra Davey’s practice of photography is closely connected to the history and the experience of reading. In “The Wet and the Dry”, autobiography and considerations on the medium mixes with the lives of Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Shelleys. This text was also the basis for Davey’s acclaimed video work The Goddesses.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula Le Giun, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

The eleventh issue of the journal-collection that brings together academic writings, interviews with artists, critical essays and artists' interventions in the form of inserts.

Featuring: Madalena Anjos, Zoe Beloff, Jean-Claude Biette, Vittoria Bonifati, Christine Burgin, Moyra Davey, Migle Dulskyte, Martha, Edelheit, Hélène Giannecchini, Donna Gottschalk, Birgit Hein, Gaëlle Hippolyte, Megan Hoetger, Jacques Julien, Sophie Lapalu, Sibylle de Laurens, Anne Lefebvre, Liz Magor, Andrea Mazzella, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Zibuntas Miksys, Vali Myers, Gaspard Nectoux, Jeffrey Perkins, Elisa Pône, James Robert Baker, João dos Santos Martins, Giovanna Scotti, Samuel Steward, Billy Sullivan, Sabrina Tarasoff, Paul Thek, and a long previously unpublished conversation (50 pages) between Paul McCarthy and Sabrina Tarasoff.

Octopus notes is a journal that gathers critical essays, academic writing, interviews, archival documents and artists' projects since 2013. Each issue exists without a theme, but shapes echo through its content.

"I spent some time looking for this quote in Moyra Davey’s Index Cards: “To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciation.” When I found it, I realized Davey was quoting “George Baker quoting Walter Benjamin.” Later on, I came upon the same quote again in Quinn Latimer’s Woman of Letters, where Latimer also talks about the way “critics adopt Davey’s unique literary style when writing about her work.” For writing to do without repeating the words of others is clearly an impossible renunciation.

Davey, who had internalized the critique of representation in the 1980s, describes the set of circumstances and coincidences that led her to photograph people in the subway after years of self- imposed restraint. For photography to do without people is not impossible, but merely hard and conceivably lonely. Until recently, Kristien Daem’s photographs mostly did without people. It took the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing obligations for her to feel the urge to photograph fellow artists. Daem has most often aimed the lens of her camera towards the quiet architecture of her native Belgium. She spent time researching and unearthing the unrealized works or forgotten projects of artists such as Fred Sandback. And when documenting the work of others, she tries to turn the task into a trade of her own."

Ce catalogue qui accompagne l’exposition Exposé·es ne se divise pas en chapitres, mais entrelace les genres et les modalités d’écriture et de documentation, avec des formats variés. Il comprend notamment une multitude de courts entretiens ou écrits autour des pratiques des artistes et de personnes concernées, des essais commandés à des auteur·rices et des séquences d’images, représentant les travaux des artistes de l’exposition, ou documentant des projets artistiques qui ont eu lieu historiquement dans le contexte de ces luttes.

Avec les artistes : Les Ami·es du Patchwork des noms, Bambanani Women’s Group, Bastille, yann beauvais, Black Audio Film Collective, Gregg Bordowitz, Jesse Darling, Moyra Davey, Guillaume Dustan, fierce pussy (Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka), Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Hervé Guibert, Barbara Hammer, Derek Jarman, Michel Journiac, Zoe Leonard, audrey liebot, Pascal Lièvre, Santu Mofokeng, Jean-Luc Moulène, Henrik Olesen, Bruno Pélassy, Benoît Piéron, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jimmy Robert, Régis Samba-Kounzi & Julien Devemy, Marion Scemama, Lionel Soukaz & Stéphane Gérard, Georges Tony Stoll, Philippe Thomas, David Wojnarowicz

Et les auteur·ices : Clémence Allezard, Cécile Chartrain, Vinciane Despret, Mylène Ferrand, Amandine Gay, Philippe Joanny, Elisabeth Lebovici, Nicolas Linnert, Sylvère Lotringer, Tim Madesclaire, Helen Molesworth, Veronica Noseda, Peggy Pierrot, François Piron, Donald Rodney, Jane Solomon, Jo-ey Tang, Gaëtan Thomas

Design graphique : Roxanne Maillet

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels and Vancouver. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Le Chauffage brings together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities with the  intent to spark discussion and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form. 

Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. And since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, it is always unclear who is really transforming who?

Contributions by: Bob Cain & Linda Miller, Moyra Davey, Laurie Kang, Niklas Taleb, Madeleine Paré & Diane Severin Nguyen, Josephine Pryde, Slow Reading Club, Ken Lum, Isaac Thomas, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Artun Alaska Arasli & Graeme Wahn, Stephen Waddell, Maya Beaudry & Chloe Chignell, Lisa Robertson, groana melendez, Victoria Antoinette Megens and Will Holder.

Editors: Emile Rubino and Felix Rapp
Co-Editor: Francesca Percival
Design: Francesca Percival and Felix Rapp
Cover Design: Francesca Percival
Printed by: Cassochrome, Belgium
Edition of 350

The first issue contains interviews with women including Carolee Schneemann, Mania Akbari, Laura Mulvey, Alice Diop, Bette Gordon, and Lis Rhodes. It contains pieces on the films of women including Kathleen Collins, Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman, Moyra Davey, Camille Henrot, Naomi Kawase, Germaine Dulac, Alice Guy-Blaché.