Howdunnit 2 - Panorama

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta’s 4th monograph, Iman Mersal navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.

Text: Iman Mersal
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
Co-publishers: Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press
Design: Julie Peeters
Size: 9.6 x 14.8 cm
Pages: 168 pages, Soft cover

Russian writer and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva was born and grew up in various parts of the USSR. The book explores the difficulty of reducing one’s sense of homeland to one’s country alone, the philosophical interconnectedness of movement and rootedness, our plant and animal souls, and how we need to reimagine our desired, fictional if need be, homelands. The book interweaves vignettes from Timofeeva’s childhood across different parts of the USSR with a philosophical discussion of ideas on homeland in the thought of Brecht, Deleuze and Guattari, and other main figures of literature and philosophy. 

Oxana Timofeeva is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), deputy editor of the journal “Stasis”, and the author of books History of Animals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), Solar Politics(forthcoming, Polity, 2022).

Commissioned and published by Kayfa ta (2020) 
Translation from Russian by Maria Afanasyeva 
Design template by Julie Peeters 
Cover illustration by Jumana Emil Abboud

In 2015, Jacob finds himself wandering the streets, swamps and cemeteries of New Orleans. Through his search for a man named Ignatius, 'O Fortuna' tells the story of his attempt to make a film. We discover the city’s unique atmosphere and meet a bizarre cast of characters who assist Jacob with his uncertain attempts at shooting scenes of DAT LIKWID LAND.

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

The uprising was staged by the minority, and a downfall is remembered by the majority.

Gilgamesh “Gil” Gupta is a theatre maker and self-defined “avant-gardist.” As a young vampire, Gil’s alienation from time, body, and identity only increases with the murder of his sire, Patrice. Seasons pass in spite of this, and Gil endeavours to circumvent inter-species edicts to foster a meaningful audience. Recognition becomes a vocation.

Confidences / Majority is a novel that presents entertainment as critical gospel. Seething a trail of cultural debris, Majority is the second instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which deploys a version of the vampire and performance as sites for transformation and maintenance.

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut; his work has recently been presented at Voiture14 (Marseille), La Maison Pop (Montreuil), Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Volksbühne Roter Salon (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Majority is published simultaneous to Cheng’s solo presentation Milieu at Édouard Montassut, Paris.