In this premiere essay, meditations on writing form a mini-antologica. The work of Piera Aulagnier is linked to that of Sade. A focus is cast on the artist Filippo de Pisis. Designed in collaboration with Sara De Bondt. Edited by Megan Francis Sullivan.
An essay in the form of painting studies - including persons, dogs, a frog, a hoofed animal, fish, hare, trees and plants.
Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.
Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.
Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).
The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.
Virginie Bobin operates across research, curatorial and editorial practices, writing, pedagogy and translation, with a particular interest in performance, experimental forms of artistic research, the role of art, artists and art institutions in the public sphere, and formats that exceed that of the exhibition. Between 2009 and 2018, she has worked for various art centers and residency programs (Villa Vassilieff, Bétonsalon, Witte de With, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Performa). She is a Doctor in Artistic Research (PhD-in-Practice, Academy of Fines Arts, Vienna, 2023), a professor in Art and Social Practices at ésadhar (Rouen, since 2024), and a co-founding member of the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة. In addition to her contributions to various international journals, she has edited the collective publications Composing Differences (Les presses du réel, 2015), Republications (with Mathilde Villeneuve, Archive Books, 2015), and Bestiario de Lengüitas (with Mercedes Azpilicueta, k.verlag, 2024).
NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.
"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."
In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.
Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?
Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.
In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).
Excerpts from Caren Beilin’s 2019 essay/memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community.
“The moon is hollow. The moon is hollow says a certain contingent of people, because of aliens (and, also, the moon has experienced bangs on its surface that have apparently made it ring just like a bell).
These people are conspiracy theorists. Paranoid, conclusive, certain. Too certain. They connect the dots with their eager, enormous chalk. They want something to be true. They want, I think, something new to be true, and they are taken (as I am) with the moon being like a bell, two phonemes, moon, bell, beautiful and struck across each other’s false armor, mutable and beautiful.
The moon is a bell, as the theorist Georges Bataille, in 1931, said, ‘The sun is an anus.’ He was arguing about the beauty – the absolute energy – of the copula.
‘The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy,’ he wrote, the year that Benjamin unpacked his library, alone. The moon is a bell, and I believe this absolutely, sure. The IUD is the RA. The sexual force of the verb, is, to be, of my verbacious being, will knock any noun into the moon and beyond. Everything is a parody, can be anything. The moon is hollow and made of muleskin. The moon is hollow, insofar as it is coated with the agglutinate, the shining coat, of a limit. I cannot go into the moon with my eyesight. I can’t enter my womb from that time (in November 2015) and sit crosslegged by the device, at the base of its suspending embedding, in the oaty red fist of my uterus, and watch the metal loam off its rigid cross-branch – and leech into tissues and activate, or reanimate, flare, or push over my problem. I can’t spy the center of the inception or the core of my being. I only know the timing. My health deteriorated rapidly after it was in, and I know how horrible it is, to cease planning for trips, outings, applications, or children, waiting and watching for how bad and how soon, and that the moon is hollow
This pamphlet excerpts from Blackfishing the IUD, published in 2019 by Wolfman Books, Oakland. With thanks to Caren Beilin, Jacob Kahn, and Justin Carder.