Portrait of the Artist as a Writer

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

The Posttraumatic is a newspaper created by creatives and artists. [eng, cast, cat]

Why a newspaper? The project believes that a newspaper is an important link between our social reality (built over the centuries by three-headed monsters and the occasional fairy godmother) and the individuals who live in it, because it is an essential communication element and because its content is a fucking drama almost always.

When Ulrich Beck, a literate man, assures us that “the media does not respond to the inspiration of the enlightenment but to that of the market and capital” we can only read the news with a distrustful and defenseless frown. Uncle Sam manipulates us to his likings and we satisfy our appetites by feasting on his words as if they were cocaine-coated cookies that only serve to fatten the need to win over arguments at our neighbor’s dinner-table conversations. We do not know if the information we swallow is invented, bought, if they are news clippings curated by a 4channer´s paranoid imagination, or if it is an objective, absolute, eternal truth.

Based on these fatalistic, dramatic and somewhat depressing theories on news and their consumption, 39 artists were contacted and each one was granted with a space, a sort of an article, to do whatever they wanted with it. It has not been intended to generate any specific ideological discourse and there is no gift flag.

With Contributions by: Escif, Ampparito, Aida Gómez, Mas Siedentop, Jofre Oliveras, Flavita Banana, Helen Bur, Michael Beitz, Biancoshock, Milu Correch, Luce, Marta Aguilar, Jan Vorman, Igor Ponosov, Ana Vilamú, Vas Ban Wieringen, Gigi Ei, Vlady, Val Rovatti, Octavi Serra, Nicolás Garcia, Valentina and the Electic Post and Others. 

Published 2021

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors. Wrapped in colors, A4 is distributed by post and available in good bookshops, in Brussels, Liège, Paris and Marseille. 

This second issue presents texts by : Chloé Delchini, Justine Gensse, Simon Johannin and Jérôme Poloczek.

Afternoon Editions no. 1: an essay by Jeroen Peeters titled Reseeding the library, gleaning readership. In May 2017, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine settled during three weeks in the Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Invited as a writer in residence, Jeroen Peeters visited the library of living books on a daily basis and recorded his observations by hand in a notebook, which formed the basis for Afternoon Edition #1. Reseeding the library, gleaning readership is an essay on the seed library, on the dispersion of literature through wind, water and animals, on biodiversity and commoning at the heart of readership. On the cover a drawing by Wouter Krokaert of a Philodendron Xanadu. Published May 2018.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol 2 ‘discores’ is written by Kexin Hao, Luca Soudant, HaYoung, Andrea Zavala Folache & Adriano Wilfert Jensen. Five strangers are stuck in changing boots next to each other and decide to embark on an intimate conversation starting from the question: “What is troubling your sexuality at the moment?”.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances.