Woman Journal Vol. 6: Back in Shape

In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.

Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?

Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.

In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).

Movement Research announces Issue 52/53 of its print publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. For this issue, Sovereign Movements: Native Dance and Performance, guest editor, choreographer Rosy Simas invited writer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, to work with her. Together they assembled contributors from Native and Indigenous communities to reflect upon their practices, the historical conditions out of which they operate as well as movement, performance, and choreography as a socio-political project. Just as it is important for physical institutions to acknowledge that they sit upon occupied land of Native and Indigenous people, so too must institutions of history, practice, and epistemology acknowledge their occupation of knowledge and memory.

Throughout this issue, dance and movement is posited as a powerful strategy against settler-colonial mindsets and as an effective tool against erasure of Native and Indigenous cultural traditions. These pages discuss the importance of Native sovereignty and analyze various histories of resistance to settler-colonialism. Artists in the issue propose alternative artistic models to probe the roles of art and artists in society towards a more expansive constellation that fundamentally critiques the Western reward system in culture as well as the often celebrated cult of authorship.

Issue 04, Structure, traces the scaffolding of our lives, seen and unseen. We travel from the palaces of Versailles to the basements of Russian resistance, from origami folds to mechanized labor, from cosmic geometry to the twitch of a stimming hand. These are the choreographies that hold us, train us, divide us, and sometimes set us free. This issue moves through power's choreography with Vinícius Portella tracing repression from TikTok algorithms to Candomblé persecution, Sasha Portyannikova documenting dance as survival under Russian authoritarianism, and Ellen Jeffrey revealing how stimming becomes its own radical dance practice. Mariam Ala-Rashi finds cosmic alignment in contortion while Michael O'Connor explores the body as origami, structure folded into self. Katja Vaghi contrasts baroque precision with contemporary chaos, and Nathaniel Moore exposes the market forces shaping European dance. Cover and insert artist, Maria Harfouche, captures structure through double-exposed analog photography and layered compositions that reveal how moments build upon each other.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice. 

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

This issue, "Spin Cycle", is concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.