Zoo Index - Reader (volume 1)

A poetic script, an apocalyptic newspaper, and a syntax of intersected historical narratives. An investigation of an archive of writings previously published in The Lowell Offering, a periodical issued between 1840-1845 by women factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Design by Daria Kiseleva

Koreografi / Choreography is a magazine initiated and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Runa Borch Skolseg and Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness. The magazine consists of texts written by Nordic artists within the field of dance and choreography.

In 1942, butcher Heinrich Angst started to set up his own business in Zurich. Today, Angst AG operates the municipal abattoir and supplies catering businesses and butchers throughout the canton. Angst is a book documenting an installation with 50 used and framed sausage wrapping papers presented at Fondation Fernet Branca in Saint Louis, France. On the other hand the book is gathering 50 systemically relevant poems surrounding writing, everyday life as a dance with obligation and panic, a society without children, fear as a fundamental quality of life and hopefulness to bury fear together. 

The work of Iranian-Belgian artist Mashid Mohadjerin (°1976, Teheran) is an intricate tapestry of personal and collective memory, weaving together photography, text, video, and archival material to explore themes of displacement, resistance, and identity.

Family chronicles merge with momentous political events and are set against the background of a broader history of the MENA-region. Mohadjerin uncovers invisible nuances hidden beneath the extraordinary and the familiar.

In Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), Mashid Mohadjerin draws from the depths of her family history, unraveling the echoes of migration, forced departures, and the quiet endurance of those caught between worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), where she explored the role of women in movements of resistance across the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze towards the intersection of masculinity, political ideology, and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in ways both visible and unseen.

Lava Lines explores the life forms, contemporary myths and geopolitical powers that shape volcanic landscapes. It gathers poetry, role play's transcription, film scripts and visual works of several artists, to touch on collective memory, non-human agency and myth-making.

The art works presented in the publication are by Leïla Arenou, Francisca Khamis, Naïmé Perrette, Camille Picquot, Rachel Pimm, Francisca Khamis, Juliette Lizotte, Riar Rizaldi and Arif Kornweitz 

It also archives live performances/screenings by Francisca Khamis, Arif Kornweitz, Mika Oki, Chooc Ly Tan, Adán Ruiz, Ana Vaz, and Rieko Whitfield.

The Compost Reader series sees the world as an interconnected being, where all its parts relate to one another. Composting as a way of cultivating consciousness through questions instead of answers, and from uncertainty and doubt. Hydro-memories, a talking lion, sounds that live in a snail shell, a dry swamp, a herbal medicine witch girl, ephemeral queer performances, chemical-sensing tentacles, stone eaters, scriptures-fossil, heavy cheese-like lids, dolphins in traffic, blue humanities, and digital forensic public spaces are some of the matters fermenting in this Compost Reader.

Authors:
Filipa Ramos
Panamby
María Morata and Lorenzo Galgó
Marie Skousen
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Zachary Schoenhut
Pauline Ruffiot
alfonso borragán
Valeria Mata and Maxime Dossin
Esther Gatón
Cristóbal Olaya Meza
Paloma Contreras Lomas

Series Co-editors: Yuri Tuma, Gabriel Alonso

With the vinyl recording of a musical, the artist proposes a new chapter in her project on fermentation as a living, palpable theory that blends body, feminism, and community.

Gut Feelings is a musical sung and performed by giant bacteria. It is a reference to lesbian separatist communities and more specifically to their capacity to create other forms and ways of life, outside of unliveable norms. The motif of fermentation here becomes a metaphor for the activity of a micro-organic and ungendered community, both human and non-human, alive, moving and changing form. In the manner of fermentation, this community in constant activity evolves autonomously, feeding itself and the space around it.

Louise Siffert (born 1988 in Strasbourg, lives and works in Paris) is a French performer. The world of work, alienation, the search for well-being, the place of habits: Louise Siffert's performances question and relate these current themes in theatrical and burlesque settings. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological reflections, she creates characters with exacerbated personalities, overexploiting the codes of language and behavior that are attributed to them.

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.