Skies

When he was prevented from guiding a writing workshop, Quim Pujol resorted to collecting exercises for the participants to work with by themselves, either alone or in small groups. These exercises, suggestions and scores draw on a wide variety of sources, such as poetry, experimental literature, dance, popular performance practices, visual art and all kinds of text populating everyday life. Now expanded into a book, they are invitations to read, write and daydream, to ‘complicate our relationship to language’ and imagine texts in multiple guises. Potential literatures that give pause, redirect the attention or, at times, simply ‘produce a comforting doodle in the volatile palimpsest of human flesh’.

Quim Pujol is an experimental artist and curator working at the crossroads of language and live arts.

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

Written from practice, this book reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with dance-makers such as Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Sabina Holzer, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Lacey, Chrysa Parkinson, deufert + plischke, Eleanor Bauer, Philipp Gehmacher and many others.

Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, crafting method, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in creation and in exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense.

And then it got legs is an invitation to think along or against, to discuss those ideas with others or explore them in the studio, and eventually to imagine and devise one’s own methods of research, observation, reflection and creation.

In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’

Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition November 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-8-9
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’
Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together.

Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

Writing from the body, from nervous impulses, sensations and gestures, but also from our being carried by matter, language and history, Sabina Holzer explores how writing may become ‘a way of singing and slip over into liminal, latent meanings and potentials.’ How to stay close to the body of the word? To perceive some of the multiplicity of our reality and ways of being, she incorporates somatic practices, ecology and new materialism, fables and science fiction in her writing. Allow me to dream a body with you gathers poetic essays and stories that delve into the fine grain of our corporeal entanglements and embeddedness. ‘Would an encounter between you and me be possible without all this?’

Sabina Holzer works in the field of expanded choreography. Her performances, interventions and texts explore the ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies with particular attention to movement and matter. She engages in practices of collaboration, philosophy, ecology, science fiction and poetry.

Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Being together in the dark awaiting a film or play, we’re actually readying ourselves for a threshold experience, for something else to appear: ‘We catch a glimpse of how the possible and the impossible are in fact threaded together, always have been.’ In these essays on the intersection of theatre, ecology, magic and darkness, Augusto Corrieri unearths forms of knowledge and attention repressed by Western modernity. How can we explore particular modes of attending to worldly things, he wonders, ‘modes of attending that value impossibility, multiplicity, drift, impermanence and dislocation, that hold dear the importance of the un-seen, the un-extracted, the un-consumed. There are things not meant for human eyes.’

Augusto Corrieri is an artist and writer. In his work he deconstructs the apparatus of theatre, inviting spectators to reflect on questions of spectacle and ecology in the twenty-first century. He presents sleight-of-hand magic performances under the pseudonym Vincent Gambini. www.vincentgambini.com

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

In collaboration with Laurent Poleo-Garnier, NIGHTNIGHT is an archive of images and texts from different sources addressing the theme of the night. Over the book as a party that degenerates with fatigue, alcohol and other stimulants, images and layout deteriorate, the subjects get tired, the vision is cloudy...

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Figurehead of the Parisian underground and queer nights, photographer, DJ, multimedia and polymorphic artist, Dora Diamant was the daughter of Pascal Doury.

Selected by Clara Pacotte and Esmé Planchon.

Afternoon Editions no. 3: Language is a map of failures. Messy thoughts on reading, writing and dressing up by Runa Borch Skolseg.

In May 2019, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine relocated its base to the Oslo Biennale headquarters in Myntgata, with a room of its own and ongoing activities. Runa Borch Skolseg visited the space at several occasions before its final closure, in 2021. Her invitation to write for the Afternoon Editions bridges the move from one room to another, and is a reflection on how fashion can be a world of fantasy, and drama, a language we all communicate through. With a personal narrative she makes readings of clothes, literature and writing, and how they merge and enrich each other.

Koreografi / Choreography is a magazine initiated and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Runa Borch Skolseg and Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness. The magazine consists of texts written by Nordic artists within the field of dance and choreography.