Itinéraires Fantômes (box set)

The first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American postmodern dancer, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings.

A foundational figure in dance, Blondell Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup, Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography.

This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Blondell Cummings (1944-2015) was a choreographer and video artist who mined everyday experiences like washing, cooking and building to create works celebrated for their rich characterizations and dramatic momentum. According to Wendy Perron, Cummings crossed over from modern to postmodern, from the Black dance community to the avant-garde community. Cummings referred to her stop-motion movement vocabulary as "moving pictures," which combined her interests in the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement. Her dances drew from an accumulation of character studies that often began with photography and workshops, and included poetry, oral histories, and projection. Her interest in moving pictures is also evidenced in her commitment to dance films. She both supported the documentation of dance, and created many experimental dance films.

Edited by Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, Glenn Phillips.
Texts by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Tara Aisha Willis, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Blondell Cummings, Veta Goler.

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

In The Third Body, the poet, novelist, feminist critic, and theorist Hélène Cixous interweaves a loose narrative line with anecdotes, autobiography, lyricism, myth, dream, fantasy, philosophical insights, and intertextual citations of and conversations with other authors and thinkers. Cixous evokes the relationship of the female narrator and her lover, a relationship of alternating presences and absences, separations and rejoinings. This relationship assumes protean forms within a complex web of writing, creating a third body out of the entwined bodies of the narrator and her lover. 

Hélène Cixous is a professor emerita of literature and founder of the Centre d'études feminines, Paris VIII. Her numerous books include Stigmata, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, The Newly Born Woman, The Laugh of the Medusa, and Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory. In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean, photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.

For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.

The reading score for the presentation at rile*books on Sunday June 23, an A to Z of Indexing / Organising / Cataloguing BFTK for Two Voices.

This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) and poet Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York's artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women.

Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolors, books and temporary monuments from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words.

Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.