O Fortuna

This collection of poetry, prose, and other texts is the first publication dedicated to the writing of the late performance, video, and visual artist Stuart Sherman.

The Stuart Sherman Papers presents a selection of facsimile reproductions from his archive at New York University's Fales Library. This collection of entries is not exhaustive but conveys the diversity in Sherman’s writing, which used the ever-expanding vocabulary of the English language as a plastic material to study the abundance of meaning that can be derived through playing with combinations, order, and proximity of words. The texts reproduced here leave his edits, scribbles, and notes to self intact, presenting the page as Sherman last engaged with it.

With text contributions by Sally Banes, Mark Bradford, Michiel Huijben, and Nicholas Martin. Photographs by Nathaniel Tileston and Paolo Rapalino.

Editor: Michiel Huijben
Graphic design: Loes Verstappen
Copy editing: Harriet Foyster
Lithography: Marc Gijzen

Stuart Sherman (1945–2001) was a New York-based artist best known for his performances and video, but working in a variety of visual and literary media. He performed, exhibited, and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Sherman died of AIDS in San Francisco in September 2001.

A moving story about love, AIDS, grief, and memory by one of the most adventurous writers to come out of San Francisco's LGBTQ+ scene.

Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America's most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.

The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.

A narrator and her dog are criss-crossing the Swiss Alps. She travels with friends who share her interest in food, languages and their topographical contexts. They collect colours, even look for colourlessness, and develop the idea of a walk-in diary, a vain attempt to archive their observations, encompassing portraits, descriptions and ruminations on mountains, hotels, people, language, food, flora and fauna.

Gradually, other mountains appear in their observations and memories, as do the mountains of literature and art. Mountains may be sites of fear and awe, of narrow-mindedness, racism and ever-looming collapse; Alpine lodges may be places of hospitality, retreat and unexpected encounters; of nature under threat.

In 515 notes, Zsuzsanna Gahse unfolds a finely woven interplay between her six characters while giving us a vivid panorama of mountain worlds, a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.

"Ces deux collines jumelles sont pour moi des contre-monuments : un héritage industriel délaissé, en friche, conservant une puissance symbolique et politique. Les messages et les crassiers sont indissociables." 

La première partie de cette édition est une collecte d'images intégrant des messages sur les crassiers (1948-2024). Ces images ont été récupérées principalement sur internet, complétées par un appel à collecte public sur les réseaux sociaux, ainsi que par la distribution de flyers et le collage d'affiches. Les images sont rassemblées chronologiquement et chaque message est recontextualisé dans son événement politique. La seconde partie présente les crassiers jumeaux en croisant plusieurs perspectives ; historique, géologique, urbaine, écologique et politique. Enfin je définis les crassiers en tant qu'outils et supports tactiques d'affichage public. Ce travail a abouti à cette première impression en janvier 2025. 

Cette édition continuera à se développer au fil du temps grâce à des rééditions régulières, intégrant des messages découverts ou récemment apparus.

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.

In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.

Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University, and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

For #2 in the ¶ (Pilcrow)-series Romy Day Winkel has approached collecting, or hoarding, as an aesthetic of patience. Through her selection of Wikipedia-articles she looks at what happens when objects, magical or otherwise, are all put together. If it is impossible, and perhaps even uninteresting, to know when a collection or archive is finished, how does one start to hoard impatiently

¶#2 consists solely of texts and images found on the online collaborative platform Wikipedia. ¶#2 is assembled by Romy Day Winkel, designed by Tjobo Kho and Wouter Stroet, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published by OUTLINE.