Quantum Dreaming

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

Ursula K. Le Guin began writing as a poet, before writing across genres for her entire life. This elegiac collection of poems, completed shortly before her death in 2018, reflects on the soul, mortality and the mysteries beyond. Weaving together rich sounds, echoes of myth and her vivid sense of our place in the natural world, So Far So Good walks between the knowable and the unknown with characteristic daring.

“great teacher. great spirit.” adrienne maree brown

The Cosmic Oval is a nocturnal entrance into an exploration of feminist cosmologies, storytelling and the many ways of knowing and imagining the hot blue beginnings of time. By turn dreaming and waking, Ella Finer enters history and imagination from the sleep side, taking her cue from Anne Carson. Finer attends to cultural memory as composition, gathering cosmic guides with whom to listen beyond what is given to hear.

In west London, the entrance to architect and theorist Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House is overlooked by The Cosmic Oval, a representation of the origin of the universe referencing both contemporary scientific discoveries about its elliptical shape and ancient cosmogonic myths. Finer’s imagined conversation between the figures who inhabit the frieze surrounding the Oval, such as Hannah Arendt, Imhotep and John Donne, re-orchestrates cultural history to explore social scenes of study and the way knowledge moves through bodies and time.

Commissioned by the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

An anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental musicand performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna.

Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.

With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti, Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.

Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille, France. She is associate researcher at PRI SM (AMU / CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, "situated" art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, sociocultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several publications. As a curator, she has collaborated with different organisations and presented her projects internationally.

Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.