The Service Porch

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).

Drawing together communiqués, covert interviews, oral and underground history of introvert struggles (Introfada), here for the first time is a detailed documentation of the political demands of shy people.

Radicalised against the imperial domination of globalised PR projectionism, extrovert poise and loudness, the Shy Radicals and their guerrilla wing the Shy Underground are a vanguard movement intent on trans-rupting consensus extrovert-supremacist politics and assertiveness culture of the twenty first century. The movement aims to establish an independent homeland – Aspergistan, a utopian state for introverted people, run according to Shyria Law and underpinned by Pan-Shyist ideology, protecting the rights of the oppressed quiet and shy people.

Shy Radicals are the Black Panther Party of the introvert class, and this anti-systemic manifesto is a quiet and thoughtful polemic, a satire that uses anti-colonial theory to build a critique of dominant culture and the rising tide of Islamophobia.

Through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image, the publication considers the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place. Alongside a collection of their works and research, Abigail Lucien weaves written and visual offerings by fellow Caribbean and queer artists, including works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Justin Chance, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Sucking Salt, and Tamara Santibañez, to create an expanded context for their work rooted in friendship and radical love.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator, auntie, lover, and friend. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI).

Lucien has taught as a full-time faculty member and professor in the Department of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In the fall of 2023, they will join the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC. Deli Gallery represents Abigail Lucien.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.