Compromised by Magic

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance. 

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

Published by Xing & Varamo Press
XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)
First edition, September 2023
Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen
Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve
Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists

Lesson on Gravity is a slice of Anne Juren’s ongoing artistic research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’. ‘What happens when our sense of ground, orientation and support is lost? What are the risk and the promise of detaching ourselves from the pull of gravity?’ As this apocryphal Feldenkrais lesson embraces moments of intrusion and fragmentation, poetry and flights of fancy, it shows how language is alive, embodied and liquid. It also invites the reader to treat the book itself as a body, an unruly tongue sticking somewhere in its folds and creases

Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. In 2021 she finished her PhD at Stockholm University of the Arts with the project Studies on Fantasmical Anatomies.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition, March 2023
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Writing from the body, from nervous impulses, sensations and gestures, but also from our being carried by matter, language and history, Sabina Holzer explores how writing may become ‘a way of singing and slip over into liminal, latent meanings and potentials.’ How to stay close to the body of the word? To perceive some of the multiplicity of our reality and ways of being, she incorporates somatic practices, ecology and new materialism, fables and science fiction in her writing. Allow me to dream a body with you gathers poetic essays and stories that delve into the fine grain of our corporeal entanglements and embeddedness. ‘Would an encounter between you and me be possible without all this?’

Sabina Holzer works in the field of expanded choreography. Her performances, interventions and texts explore the ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies with particular attention to movement and matter. She engages in practices of collaboration, philosophy, ecology, science fiction and poetry.

Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’
Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together.

Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

Skies is a practice that emerged when Edurne Rubio and María Jerez found themselves working in isolation during the creation process of their performance A Nublo in 2020. A dialogue in pictures capturing the skies above Madrid, Brussels and many other places, it is now a book and document of a particular time that invites others to reminisce as they read the clouds and ponder invisible worlds that haunt the aether. It comes with an essay by Augusto Corrieri on theatre and cosmos.

Edurne Rubio is a visual artist. Her work leans towards the documentary and starts out from orality and storytelling. 

María Jerez creates work at the intersection of choreo graphy, film and visual art. With her work, she wants to open up spaces of possibility through the encounter with what is foreign to us.

www.edurnerubio.org
www.mariajerez.com

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition October 2022
200 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-6-5
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

Matters of Feminist Practice, edited by Poupeh Missaghi and Karla Kelsey, brings together scholars, writers, poets, and artists of different identities and backgrounds to confer on the urgent topic of “feminist practice” through seven topics: the body, the quotidian, hybridity, language, documentation, environment, and conflict.

In the twenty-five scholarly and creative-critical pieces included in our introductory volume, each contributor brings unique visions, insights, approaches, voices, and forms to launch the conversation, which will continue to unfold online at mfpjournal.com. 

Contributors to the inaugural issue include: Alexis Almeida, Mary-Kim Arnold, Mildred Barya, Teresa Carmody, Julie Carr, Serena Chopra, Caroline Crumpacker, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Marcella Durand, Jennifer Firestone, Yanara Friedland, Carla Harryman, Madhu Kaza, Petra Kuppers, Jean Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Megan Madden, Saretta Morgan, Lida Nosrati, Adrienne Perry, Frances Richard, Kat Savino, Celina Su, and Rachael Guynn Wilson.

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience).