The COVID-19 Kink Zine

UPWARDLY/DOWNWARDS.

Contributions by Bob Ajar (NY), Jessica Bard (NY), Sam Basu (FR), Paul Birbil (NY), David Burrows (LND), John Chilver (LND), Lisa Conrad (CA), Nina Katchadourian (NY), James Chance (MEX), Jon Kinzel (NY), Roy Kortick (NY), Emily Kuenstler (CA), Cedar Lewisohn (LND), Drea Marks (MA), Francesca Mannoni (NY), & Elizabeth Tisdale (NY).

Schizm Magazine invites contemporary artists and writers to contribute pages in response to a theme which, as the title implies, engages with a paradoxical idea. Each issue combines archival material with original works and texts sent in by between ten to thirty contributors.

Talker is an interview zine about performance. 

This is Issue #6. It features a conversation with Spanish artist Dora García.

For over 18 years García has worked with performance to deal critically with relationships between artworks, audiences, and places. Her projects are often developed in response to works by others and deploy performers as intermediaries in ambiguous roles as undercover agents, prophets, guides or spies.

In this conversation she traces the origins of her performance practice from a diverse creative community in Brussels in the early 2000s to the Happenings by Argentinian polymath Oscar Masotta happening again in her recent work Segunda Vez (2018). 

Askia Touré was there at the birth of the Black Arts Movement. He was there at the birth of Black Power. In the era of decolonisation, Touré’s visionary poems and essays spoke powerfully to the Tricontinental struggle against the forces of colonialism and white supremacy in Latin America, Asia and Africa. They continue to speak to this struggle today. This 50th anniversary edition of Touré’s visionary 1972 book Songhai! is his first UK book publication and provides a powerful guide to the states and stages of Black radical politics not only during and up to 1972, but into our uncertain future.

Reprinted with a new foreword and original preface by Askia Touré, original introduction by John Oliver Killens, and a new introduction by David Grundy. Illustrations by Abdul Rahman.

Askia Touré is one of the pioneers of the Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement and the Africana Studies movement. Ishmael Reed has called Touré “the unsung poet laureate of cosmopolitan Black Nationalism.” His poetry has been published across the United States and internationally, including in Paris, Rome, India, and The People’s Republic of China. His books include From the Pyramids to the Projects, winner of the 1989 American Book Award for Literature; African Affirmations: Songs for Patriots: New Poems, 1994 to 2004, and Mother Earth Responds. In 1996, he was awarded the prestigious Gwendolyn Brooks Lifetime Achievement award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Institute in Chicago. Now based in Massachusetts, since August 2019, Mr. Touré has been reading with the Makanda Orchestra, beginning with a celebration of the South African musician Ndikho Xaba.

In this essay, written in English and French, Vilnius-based artist Anastasia Sosunova unfolds her research on the history of printing, from Daniel Hopfer’s etchings to underground printers from the Soviet era, and connected the printing “matrix” to the mother figure, referencing Ocean Vuong and Guadalupe Nettel.

Ocean Vuong writes, “I’m not a monster. I’m a mother”; Jeanette Winterson: “She was a monster but she was my monster.” And thus, the monster I refer to is the one that gives birth to the prints that shape the tongues, fears, and beliefs of vast groups of people. Books of marvels and beasts, now considered emblems of a dark age of ignorance and superstition, proliferated in the 15th and 16th centuries thanks to emergent printing technologies and the influential naturalists they helped create. In the illustrations of scientific explorations by Fortunio Liceti, Athanasius Kircher, or Ulisse Aldrovandi, the lines between fact and fiction were irrelevant as they were impossible to discern.

This chapbook is published as part of the project “Mi-Monstre Mi-Livre,” organised by After 8 Books, Ariel Ink, Publication Studio Paris and Six Chairs Books, during a residency at Aperto, Paris, in the framework of the Lithuanian Season in France.

This collection of 20 poems by young poets Holly Miles and Joseph Dunkerley sheds a glimpse into the bizarre journey of two isolated souls in a time of global crisis. Read along in this 24 page zine as they chart their unique perspectives of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic!