Intourism

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

‘A Tone or Two’ comes in the form of a text score and a melodic voice work. Noticing a shift in her voice in recent years, Thams tracks how within the last decades female voices have lowered 23hz in pitch. Tuning into the shift toward more gender equality, vocal pitch is explored in relation to authority, electability, courage and rhythmicity.

With link to online sound work.

An encounter between dance and visual arts.

Dance First Think Later - The Thinking Body between Dance and Visual Arts follows on from the exhibition-festival Dance First Think Later - An Encounter between Dance and Visual Arts, presented in Geneva in summer 2020, documenting it with a wealth of iconography and enriching it with a critical, theoretical and historical perspective on the works and the project. Commissioned texts are devoted to the 22 artists, written by authors active in museums, festivals, art schools, independent critics and artists.

The biennial event Dance First Think Later explores the converging fields between dance, performance, visual arts and moving images. Arta Sperto, which is organising and producing the exhibition-festival and publishing the book, is developing a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the operating mechanisms of the visual and performing arts, and the respective characteristics of museums/art centres and theatres/festivals. This approach is motivated by the need to support artists whose cross-disciplinary practices come up against the way in which culture is still largely organised by field, whether in terms of cultural policies, institutions, funding or the media. Starting with the works themselves, the book offers food for thought on cross-disciplinary approaches to the contemporary arts.

With / around Halil Altindere, Alexandra Bachzetsis & Julia Born, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Alex Cecchetti, Clément Cogitore, Dara Friedman, Gerard & Kelly, Marie-Caroline Hominal, Lenio Kaklea, La Ribot, Pierre Leguillon, Xavier Le Roy, Klara Lidén, Melanie Manchot, Olivier Mosset & Jacob Kassay, Samuel Pajand, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Alexandra Pirici, Julien Prévieux, Marinella Senatore, Gregory Stauffer, Barbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca.

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.