Stop Being Straight - Edition

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.

HONEY is a zine meditating on the experiences of friendship. 

Volume 2 was edited by Mars Dietz, Opashona Ghosh and Dylan Spencer-Davidson—each inviting contributions from friends. 

Following vol. 1’s optimism about the underappreciated potentials of friendship, vol. 2 marks a noticeable turn towards friendship's messier sides. Letters to deceased friends, childhood social complexities, unrealised sexual desire, pushback against the overfetishisation of queer kinship, and more. 

Contributions from Azul De Monte, Ana Božičević, D Mortimer, Adriana Disman, Pelumi Adejumo, Iggy Robinson, Clay AD, To Doan, Edward Herring, marum, Lou Drago, Aisha Mirza, Iga Świeściak, Roya Amirsoleymani, George Lynch, Emily Pope and Kari Rosenfeld. 

Original artworks by Opashona Ghosh and Iga Świeściak, and featuring artworks by Azul De Monte and Emily Pope. 

Riso printed on recycled paper with Pagemasters (London).

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Dans l’imaginaire collectif, l’œuf évoque la fragilité et la promesse de vie, tandis que la pierre renvoie à la permanence et à la disparition. Cette édition tente de déplacer cette opposition à travers une forme fragmentaire. Il rassemble des notes écrites au fil du temps. Sa production suit cette logique : imprimé en offset, le projet prend en compte les formats de papier afin d’en optimiser l’usage. Les chutes sont utilisées dans un cahier complémentaire, rassemblant textes et images laissés en marge. La reliure, cousue à la main au fil de coton, reste simple et légère. L’objet se conçoit comme quelque chose à manipuler et découvrir, entre publication et transmission plus intime. 

« J’ai donc cherché une forme simple, en évitant tout formalisme superflu. Le projet repose sur une question : est-il nécessaire de produire ce type d’objet, et pourquoi ? » 

In the collective imagination, the egg suggests fragility and the promise of life, while stone evokes permanence and disappearance. This edition seeks to move beyond this opposition through a fragmentary form. It gathers notes written over time. Its production follows the same logic: printed in offset, the project takes paper formats into account in order to optimize their use. Offcuts are used in a supplementary section, gathering texts and images left aside. The binding is hand-sewn with cotton thread, remaining simple and lightweight. The object is conceived as something to handle and discover, between publication and a more intimate form of transmission. 

“So I sought a simple form, avoiding unnecessary formalism. The project rests on a question: is it necessary to produce this type of object, and why?”

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

This publication acts as a postscriptum to the exhibition project Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders by Simon Asencio for SB34—The Pool in Brussels. Dedicated to Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi and sexutopia novel, the exhibition was conceived as a process of annotating the book, expanding on the ethics discussed by the characters of the novel through installation, performative readings and with the complicity of other artists and their works. This devious object pursues such an intertextual process, extending and disseminating the writings forged by the exhibition. 

Cette publication se présente comme le post-scriptum de l'exposition de Simon Asencio Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders pour SB34—The Pool à Bruxelles. Dédiée au roman de science-fiction et de sexutopie de Samuel R. Delany dont elle porte le titre, l'exposition a été pensée comme un processus d'annotation de ce livre, développant les formes éthiques mises en pratique par les personnages du récit, à travers des installations, des lectures et situations performatives, avec la complicité d'autres artistes. Cet objet interlope poursuit ce processus intertextuel, en prolongeant et disséminant les écritures forgées par l'exposition.

With contributions by / avec les contributions de: Reinhold Aman, Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Jen Brodie, Chloe Chignell, Jack Cox, Samuel R. Delany, Diana Duta, Loucka Fiagan, gladys, Stefa Govaart, Sean Gurd, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Bernard-Marie Koltès, David J. Melnick, Matthieu Michaut, Margaret Miller, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum, Grisélidis Réal, Páola Revenióti, Sabrina Seifried, Raphaëlle Serres, Valerie Solanas, sabrina soyer, Megan Susman.

La Redoutable compile les archives lesbiennes de trois provenances distinctes mais complémentaires. Aux abords de l’ARCL (Archives Recherches Culture Lesbiennes) se rencontre Caroline Drieu, Roxanne Maillet et Suzette Robichon. Elles se racontent des mots imprimés sur des t-shirts et des gapettes. Ces slogans, fruits de détournements, plagiats et jeux de mots sont en plus d’être revendicateurs, des signes distinctifs pour un réseau de lesbiennes absolument occupées à incarner les attitudes qui les définissent. Ces viragos peuvent se connaître ou non, mais un jour, ielles se retrouveront certainement dans des jardins partagés, à des groupes de lecture, des barbecues ou des karaokés.

A fascinating account of Lankton's inquisitive, sociological and emotional ruminations in advance of her gender-affirming surgery.

This is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton's (1958-96) journals, sketchbooks and daybooks to appear in the artist's archives, and the first to be published in facsimile form. Written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the journal offers key insights into Lankton's mind at work before her career-defining move to New York in 1978, where she would become an important figure of the East Village art scene in the 1980s and early '90s with her lifelike dolls and theatrical sets.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams and aspirational, occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the 19-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of the days recorded here; days leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity and human behavior.