Auditing Intimacy

ROT is the catalogue for a community of practices.
ROT is a medicine and a ritual. The prescription for a new therapy.
ROT is a manual without instructions. A map. A party.
ROT touches upon sci-fi doomed scenarios.
ROT works within the ruins of the future.
ROT engages in weird beautification processes.
ROT uses mushrooming as a research method.
ROT hosts essays, stories, poetry, interviews, visuals, recipes, horoscopes and more.
ROT is mouldy.
ROT is glossy and asks to be touched.

With contributions by Adrijana Gvozdenović, Agnese Krivade, Alix Eynaudi, Anne Juren, Asli Hatipoglu, Carolina Mendonça, Cécile Tonizzo, Coline Gautier, Daniele Gasparinetti, Deborah Robbiano, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Elke Van Campenhout, Ēriks Ašmanis, Eve Gabriel Chabanon, Gary Farrelly, Goda Palekaitė, Günbike Erdemir, Jaime Llopis, Jennifer Russo, Jeroen Peeters, Jonas Palekas, Kristin Wiking, Lucia Palladino, Luciano Maggiore, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Michelle Anay Woods, Muna Mussie, Muslin Brothers, Natasha Papadopoulou, Nina Janela, Norberto Llopis, Paloma Bouhana, Peggy Pierrot, Sandra Muteteri Heremans, Santiago Ribelles Zorita, Sara Manente, Sébastien Tripod, Sina Seifee, Sofie Durnez, Wilson Le Personnic

Sara Manente is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher who promotes collaborative situations in heterogeneous formats. Drawing on the imagery and matter of living cultures and mycelium brought into relation with live arts, her recent projects reflect on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication.

Published by Varamo Press
First edition, August 2023
136 pages, 22 x 30 cm, perfect binding
ISBN 978-82-693189-2-0
Graphic design by Deborah Robbiano

A survey of and reflection on artists using/ hijacking institutional formats. 

Self-Institution/Terminology Audit is a collection of profiles and lexicons documenting artistic practices that operate as self-declared institutions. It examines the act of self-institution as both a conceptual and operational approach, focusing on how these practices structure themselves and engage with their contexts.

Initiated by the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), this publication investigates artist offices, bureaus, departments, ministries, societies, centres, and other explicitly institutional invocations. The Terminology Audit reveals language and jargon unique to each practice. The case studies, currently active in the field, represent a broad range of approaches, including research-based, performance-driven, pragmatic, materially motivated, counter-institutional, esoteric, and absurd facsimiles of institutionhood.

The publication was conceptualized and introduced by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly (O.J.A.I.), featuring an essay by Gary Farrelly, due diligence text by Andrea Knezović, and a responsorial note by Alicja Melzacka. Included self-instituted entities are: The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR), The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), Self Luminous Society, Gesellschaft zur Emanzipation des Samples G.E.S, Department of Ultimology, Minister of Cosmic People, Tac.ka Association, KOLXOZ, Pls, I’m Trying to Think Institute (PITTI), This Institute, Aurora-Rhoman Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics, AARS (Antwerp Artist Run School), The Letter Space Department (TLSD), Temporary Information Center (T.I.C.).

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

Written in response to three “physical” photographs, ‘Broken Villas’ contains and considers how a vessel might clasp tightly to known volumetric identities, but also loom with a set of accentuated clues towards otherness: the excavated seams in the earth and what we fill those holes with, imaginary or otherwise; the glacial erraticism of the boulder; the queer crimping of a hotel pillowcase; the modes via which objects are housed as display, but also packaged away, with sorrow, with fear, with erotism etc.