Issue #54 - Spatial Practice

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). 

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

This publication acts as a postscriptum to the exhibition project Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders by Simon Asencio for SB34—The Pool in Brussels. Dedicated to Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi and sexutopia novel, the exhibition was conceived as a process of annotating the book, expanding on the ethics discussed by the characters of the novel through installation, performative readings and with the complicity of other artists and their works. This devious object pursues such an intertextual process, extending and disseminating the writings forged by the exhibition. 

Cette publication se présente comme le post-scriptum de l'exposition de Simon Asencio Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders pour SB34—The Pool à Bruxelles. Dédiée au roman de science-fiction et de sexutopie de Samuel R. Delany dont elle porte le titre, l'exposition a été pensée comme un processus d'annotation de ce livre, développant les formes éthiques mises en pratique par les personnages du récit, à travers des installations, des lectures et situations performatives, avec la complicité d'autres artistes. Cet objet interlope poursuit ce processus intertextuel, en prolongeant et disséminant les écritures forgées par l'exposition.

With contributions by / avec les contributions de: Reinhold Aman, Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Jen Brodie, Chloe Chignell, Jack Cox, Samuel R. Delany, Diana Duta, Loucka Fiagan, gladys, Stefa Govaart, Sean Gurd, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Bernard-Marie Koltès, David J. Melnick, Matthieu Michaut, Margaret Miller, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum, Grisélidis Réal, Páola Revenióti, Sabrina Seifried, Raphaëlle Serres, Valerie Solanas, sabrina soyer, Megan Susman.

Avec les poèmes et traductions de: Warsan Shire, Sika Fakambi, Anne-Claire Hello, Aurore Dal Mas, Connie Scozzaro, Chloe Chignell, Camille Fresnois, Simon Asencio, Marie De Quatrebarbes.

Aves les images de Aurore Dal Mas.

Édition: Thomas Le Goff, Emmanuel Régniez, Tomas Sidoli.

Les éditions du quelconque se divisent en deux projets, une maison d'édition (à venir) et une revue, Un Rectangle Quelconque. Cette dernière, chaque semestre, propose de découvrir des auteurs de poésie venant de tous horizons géographiques et esthétiques. La maison d'édition, elle, sera l'occasion de présenter aux lecteurs francophones des nouvelles voix de la poésie actuelle.

Vaginal Davis offers insights into her collaborative practice of making music in art-punk bands in Los Angles and Berlin.

The artist Vaginal Davis certainly moves on dangerous ground with her transgressive shuffling of gender and genre boundaries. The self-described "sexual repulsive" co-founded several art/punk bands in her expansive 40-year-plus career, namely Afro Sisters, ¡Cholita!, Pedro, Muriel & Esther (PME), black fag and Tenderloin. As a writer and "Whoracle et Delphi", Ms. Davis turns her quirky hairy eyeball to the collective practice of making music in the saucy underground scenes of Los Angeles and Berlin. In their contributions, longtime comrades and collaborators Bibbe Hansen (artist and Warhol Silver Factory habitué) and Felix Knoke (guest performer for The Hidden Cameras and band member of Tenderloin) rave about joint performances and rehearsals, divulging sacred secrets and rifts. Bruce "Judy" LaBruce, Glen Meadmore and Lisa "Suckdog" Carver make surprise guest appearances, along with images from live performance spectacles The White to Be Angry, Trust Fund, Interracial Dating Game, We're Taking Over, Afro De Sade and Camp/Anti-Camp: A Queer Guide to Everyday Life.

Edited by Jenny Schlenzka and Julia Grosse.
Texts and works by Vaginal Davis, Bibbe Hansen, Felix Knoke.

Published on the occasion of Vaginal Davis's exhibition at Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2025.

Vaginal Davis is a Berlin-based American intersexed artist, queer icon of art and music. Vaginal Davis herself is a living work of art: a performer, writer and creator of iconic zines; a visual artist, experimental filmmaker; a self-proclaimed Blacktress and drag terrorist, a gossip columnist, influential socialite, educator and countercultural renegade. Since the late 1970s, her oeuvre has pushed the boundaries of art, music and performance. Inspired by the militancy of the Black Panthers’ pursuit of social justice in the United States, she named herself after feminist and Black Power activist Angela Davis.

As If They Had A Spirit is the first comprehensive monograph of artist Pontus Pettersson. Using drawing and narration, the book expands on Pettersson’s sculptural, poetic and choreographic practice through the accounts and fabulations of long term collaborators. As If They Had A Spirit centers the acts of re-membering, re-telling and re-tracing as situated  methods for documenting and studying the protracted and evolving nature of process-based artistic practices.

Recounted and drawn by Linnea Hansander, Robert, Malmborg, Diana Orving, Karina Sarkissova, Sandra Lolax, Stina Nyberg, Anna Koch, Peter Mills, Anna Efraimsson and Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)

Edited and redrawn by Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)
Editing assistance Izabella Borzecka
Published by Galerie, Int
Co-publisher & Distibribution: PAM, Stockholm

As If They Had A Spirit was made possible with generous support by the Swedish Arts Council, Weld, MDT and PAM

Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
 
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.
 
Since its inception, This Container has hoped to contribute to a feminist lineage of textual production. What constitutes this lineage? This is a vast question. The beginning of an answer might start by saying something about genre. If , as Lauren Berlant writes, genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation”, a “formalization of aesthetic or emotional conventionalities”, then genre crafts expectation by pointing to what is recognizable in form.1 If feminism is about wanting the world to be otherwise, the multiplication of genres inducing the multiplication of (imagined) stories helps to recraft expectation toward a less oppressive, less boring, and more just world. Feminist work includes genre work. Poetry, diary, diagram, notes, recipe, critique, the sound file, the epistolary, the essay, the art project: they have all found their way in, sculpting a diverse set of readerly structures of affective expectation. They are to shift your worldly expectations.

More info at http://www.thiscontainer.com

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.