The Posthumanist #2 Rhythms / Rhythmen

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience). 

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.

Like Freud’s prototypical baby, we struggle over whether to keep our body together or to give it away. We all live these scenes of bodily loss. Freud and Marx both sing harmoniously: what we give up, we give under duress. We are not easy with what we’ve been tasked with, but the task has been the same since birth, doubled in the name of emancipation: first, there’s nothing less than to survive alienation and exploitation, then there’s staying alive for one another’s sake. Perhaps the storied antagonism between Freud and Marx turns on the difficulty of holding these tasks together, balanced on the knife’s edge that separates self-interest from collective liberation.

Capitalism does not produce itself all alone, no matter its disciplines and political-economic constraints on the reproduction of society. If Marx taught us anything, it’s that capitalism produces its own gravediggers, the proletariat—“the unreason of reason,” he quipped, where the dominant social order encounters its unconscious element. Through the bad exchange of capitalism comes a gothic reversal, from preconscious life to premature death, where workers end up burying themselves instead of the system that provides the grave plot. That exchange is felt internally, in a rift that cleaves open the self. Freud, for his part, helps us describe how political economy hammers our lives into unreasonable and reasonable shapes, imaginary and real, as countless and heterogeneous as the individual faces in a collective mass. For each and for all, we bring psychoanalysis to bear on the political-economic problems we suffer in common.

King Ketamine. Beyond the vibecession. Austere Mothers. Sick at Work. Money, Feces, Babies, Gifts. Essays by Juliana Spahr, Peter Coviello, Nicolás Medina Mora, Jyoti Rao, and Hannah Proctor. Images of Red Vienna from Wilhelm Reich’s camera, dispatches from Lebanon, and more.

BRAIDS is a 130 pages-long publication that features both visual and written works of 20 young creatives. The desire of BRAIDS is to expand the idea of queerness beyond the borders of identity. The journal exists to host bodies that deny framing and dare to expose the vulnerability of their difference. The publication is thus a woven story of the contemporary globalised queer, insecure but daring, honey-glazed yet continuously aching. 

Regions surface often in this issue—across arts, tales, and gatherings of individuals and meanings—as a possibility to bypass the borders of nation-states and the meta-geographies of colonial modernity.

Slavs and Tatars; Hera Chan on Stephanie Comilang; Stephanie Bailey on Ho Tzu Nyen; Drifting into the Atmospheric by Sohrab Mohebbi; Lauren Cook contributes nine newly commissioned note-like fiction pieces; Asad Raza on Édouard Glissant; Mira Dayal in conversation with Shanzhai Lyric, TJ Shin, and jina valentine; Temporary Communities, Four Points on Radically Public Institutions by Elvira Dyangani Ose; A Signature Truer Than the Name by Dani Blanga Gubbay; tidbits: Ruoru Mou by Amy Jones; Virginia Ariu by Brit Barton; Bagus Pandega by Harry Burke; Ceidra Moon Murphy by Alex Bennett; Oshay Green by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi; Shafei Xia in conversation with Danielle Shang; books by Christian Rattemeyer; Guest Design: Lamm & Kirch.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Mousse is a bimonthly contemporary art magazine. Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism, visual arts, and curating today, alternated with a series of distinctive articles in a unique tabloid format.