Books
Books
in random order
University of California Press
Dictee (Second Edition, Reissue, Restored)
Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.
A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.
The Book of Na
In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.
Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.
Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising
It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality.
A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.
Twenty Shadows
[Available for preorders. Shipping 26 October.]
Twenty Shadows tells of a man’s spiritual change following the suicide of his son after a long addiction. Haunted by this loss and the unknown desire of his only child, thinking and writing with a new emptiness, he finds a form of expression that was previously impossible.
This singular book brings together the reflections of one of our greatest living philosophers with a father’s grief. —Todd McGowan
Taking its title from Shakespeare’s Richard II—“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows”—this book follows personal tragedy into the murky place where memory and interpretation become indistinguishable. What lies at its heart is a meditation on the unknowability of the other. —Charlotte Northall
Richard Boothby is right that no amount of intellect curbs the impulses of real experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to remain in a state of ignorance. Composed from the leftovers of terrible, unassimilable events, this book gives us bracing indications of ways to live on in a diminished aftermath. —Justin Clemens
Richard Boothby is professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Boothby’s books include Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (1991), Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (2001), Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us about Sex and Gender (2006), and Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (2023). He lives in Baltimore.
Steal This Book
Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.
Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice.
The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.
Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp.
Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Edges of Ailey
Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance.
Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.
Contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
The Complex Answer – On Art as a Nonbinary Intelligence
The Complex Answer presents the reader with a selection of texts—from 2010 to 2021—that introduce an exercise in how a practice of art and exhibition making has been influenced by philosophical thinking.
One form of thinking oriented towards the production of an epistemological space where art is not illustrating ideas but enacting thinking and activating experience as an epistemological force that slowly erodes and, eventually, erases the culture-nature divide.
All the texts have been published before and yet—for the sake of creating a dramaturgy and stressing the thesis—they have been reedited and partly rewritten. The texts aim to enforce the idea that art is an intelligence that is influenced by ideas and the emergence of new notions but also thinking through experience. An experience that is aesthetic and epistemological in equal terms.
CARA Center for Art, Research and Alliances
Judith Namala: A Novella
Judith Namala: A Novella, Serubiri Moses’s fiction debut, is an experiment in adaptation, storytelling, and translation as fictocriticism. Set in Uganda between the late 1970s and early 2000s, the book follows the domestic dramas of Judith Namala, a Black maid, and Esther Nambi, her Black madam.
Unfolding across short vignettes, Moses’s innovative prose attends to the silences and opacities that mark the distances—and forced proximities—between two characters whose tense relationship is defined by class and social hierarchy. Hovering at the surface of these quiet scenes of servitude, the narrator offers an enigmatic model of interiority—grasped only in passing, where psychic geographies confront and sometimes, surprisingly, mirror one another.
Drawing on cultural artifacts, art, film, and his own translation of lyrics from a Luganda popular music songbook, Moses spins a story of housework and labor that reaches across forty years of Ugandan history. Written in a unique style informed by oral tradition, folklore, criticism, and reportage, Judith Namala: A Novella is an intimate, domestic portrait that embraces the poetics of metaphor.
Judith Namala is a cinematic dressing-down of airs and manners: a collision of tradition, ritual, and other social parameters revealed through imperatives or hauntings. In a series of lyric portraits riffing off echoes of Annie John and Sula, poet-writer-curator Serubiri Moses exercises his multitalented explorations of text and artifacts, each image operating almost like a fetish. Here, the elite and extracted, the rural and cosmopolitan, are juxtaposed in suffocations of domesticity.
—Ladan Osman
Through its innovative structure combining rich storytelling, history, and the writer’s own commentary, Judith Namala tells the story of a household in Uganda in which a young woman from the rural areas is employed as a maid. The story reveals the depth of injustice at the household level, where one woman’s child is abandoned, whilst the children of an elite Kampala household are over-mothered.
—Sitawa Namwalie
Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and writer living in New York City. He is the author of two poetry books, THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK and You Who Suffer Because You Love, Love Still More (pântano books, 2023 and 2025). His fiction has appeared in Lolwe and Ursula. Moses is a contributing editor at e-flux journal, and teaches at Hunter College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. This is his first novel.
Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Copy Editor: Re’al Christian
Designer: Stoodio Santiago da Silva, Bárbara Acevedo
Time Suspended
Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer and 1 more
The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.
In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.
BUTT 37
Lots of straight-talking in BUTT no. 37. Catch Édouard Louis shot by Nan Goldin, Bruce LaBruce meeting Omar Apollo, real talk with Brazilian deputy Erika Hilton and dirty talk with Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier. Plus a lesbian threeway, Bogotá’s sauna/museum, cocks in sock and oh so much more. Bangers only.
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.
An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.
Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.
—Chris Kraus
The Mirror of Simple Souls
In her first book of poems, Leah Flax Barber revives an actress figure of the commedia dell'arte to consider her own destiny as a soon-to-be historical subject. Taking its title from Marguerite Porete's fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber's stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: "Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century."
The Mirror of Simple Souls, a series of repeated beginnings and endings, is a form of speech act which, through a Freudian Durcharbeiten, or working through, brings about a new beginning. And, in its movement from this Freudian "working through" to a Hegelian Aufhebung, lets us begin, again, at the beginning, at the end. —CYNTHIA CRUZ
The spare poems of The Mirror of Simple Souls evoke and then draw back into shimmer. Herein, a performance that suffuses the horizon with beautiful absurdity: a shirt sewn with mirrors that reflect a strange and evanescing world-at-large, “an I where the nay was.” Drawing from film, mystical texts, commedia dell'arte, the reader finds that there “is paraphernalia of life / all over.” This paraphernalia is a kind of “segue music” for the endlessly indeterminate. The old adage claims that we can’t step into the same river twice, but Leah Flax Barber creates an evocative, provocative current through which each step is at once past, present, and future. —ELIZABETH ROBINSON
Leah Flax Barber is a daring and brilliant new poet. Her voice is restless and coiled and sprung as we discover "The demonic finalist / Of material culture / Is love / There is paraphernalia of life / All over / A woman.” There is also a take-no-prisoners attitude throughout this startling and powerful book. These poems are vital and necessary and perform “The wounded chance / To think in public.” This book will move you, scare you, and blow you away. —PETER GIZZI
Leah Flax Barber's first book reads like a journey, a kind of anabasis, passing back through the myth and history which are its own antecedents. It manifests, in the encounter, a saturnalian world: ludic, dark and sensuous, strange and vibrant with thought. I was delighted to travel with it. —CLAIRE DeVOOGD
It's Too Late. Do It Anyway!
Cassie Thornton, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova
Hey culture worker! Are you feeling alone and afraid while the world burns? It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! is two books in one, created for cultural workers who want to get off the racial capitalist high-speed-train-to-nowhere and start structuring revolution through collective care.
It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! offers two routes into a fractal support network designed to shed absurd, useless forms of artworld prestige in favor of collectively producing a world organized to support caregivers. It’s Too Late tells the true story of an exhibition about care that exposed the difference between making symbolic gestures and actually doing something. Do It Anyway! serves as a manual for The Hologram, a prism-shaped collective care protocol conceptualized by artist Cassie Thornton, inspired by the Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki in Greece, and now practiced by people all over the world.
In It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! multiple voices weave The Hologram into the present, the past, and the future all at once, ultimately putting the story and the tools it describes into each reader’s life-wizened hands. This is not really a book; it’s a pathway out of the tough spot we are all in right now. Anyone can make use of it, even you.
Mouvement #128
How the right wing is ruining culture, part II; in Sicily, humanitarian flotillas bound for Gaza are on the US Army's radar; Alice Diop and the Black Venus; Iraqi singer Sajda Obeid unites the country; theater according to Sylvain Creuzevault; the British left reveals fascism...
Founded in 1995, Mouvement is a French “indisciplinary cultural magazine”, published quaterly.
An Anarchist Playbook. Radical Translation Workshop
Cristina Viti, Jacob McGuinn and 2 more
The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.
Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences).
Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.
Jungle
Jungle, (the latest 2025 self-published zine offering from studio saudari), delves into The Socio-Political, The Pitfalls of Neoliberalism, Circus State, Environmental Collapse, Heterotopias & Growth ~ Decay.
Referencing Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1905), this print issue aims to combine various interpretations of The Jungle as a site of critique, of contention, of potential growth.
Contributors:
y3000w, Video Club, Fred Horton, Jordan Ossermann, Tristac Gac, Tom Hegen, Santiago Barragán, Anu Jakobson, Camille Theodet, George Nebieridze, Mu Pan, Robert Zhao Renhui, Thérèse Rafter, Cecilia Vicuña, Dani Santander Villarroel, Adam Call Roberts, Dr. Sönke Johnsen, Elena Zaghis, Miguel Garchitorena, Amanda Nell Eu, Mishka Mahomed, Dani Kyengo O'Neill / BŪJIN, Erin Jane Nelson, Mariana E. Rivas Salazar, Kim Rosario, Rachel Lamot, Marion Post Wolcott, Madina Mahomedova.
Designed by Felicia Usinto & Sera van de Water
Silicone God
Shae wants to stop shagging other women's husbands and be a proper queer. Plus, she's bored of only ever getting to use her new strap on a pile of cushions. The answer seems simple enough: come out, go out, and finally get it on with the fit bird at Dyke Night. Or it would be if Evaline, a wayward silicone mistress from the future, wasn't jealous...
A surreal, dirty little book that falls somewhere between Derek McCormack, David Cronenberg, and the tentacle porn you 'accidentally downloaded', Silicone God is for those who like it very, very weird.
Open Box (IMPROVISATIONS)
This expanded new edition of Carla Harryman's early-'00s classic, OPEN BOX, features a new introduction by Rachel Levitsky and new afterwords by erica kaufman and Carla Harryman.
GRNN alert just in—Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman’s OPEN BOX. This dance of demi-characters—half half, semiquaver, three hooks quarter—places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain armed forces. Next up: removing oneself to another place; migration.
—Tina Darragh
Carla Harryman’s Open Box is a meditation-in-process on the possibility of a poetry available to cultural, social and political critique that does not unwittingly reinscribe the political, social and cultural formations (textual and otherwise) against which it is posed. Because Harryman wants to preserve a ‘place,’ if not ‘places,’ for an aesthetic and procedure resistant to reification, she deploys improvisation as writing, as textual practices open to the future and, more ambitiously, to the past, to the written.
—Tyrone Williams
Carla Harryman is an innovator in interdisciplinary performance, poetry, and prose. She has authored seventeen books including W— /M— (2013), Adorno’s Noise (2008), Gardener of Stars (2001), and the multi-authored work The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980. Her Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally. She has received many grants and awards including from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America Next Stage, Fund for Poetry, and The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation.
Carla Harryman is also the author of The Wide Road, a collaborative book with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna*, 2011, reprinted 2026).
Poster Edition (bundle)
4 poèmes-affiches, format A3, impriméx en risographie au studio Colorama (Berlin), sur papiers variés, tirage à 150 exemplaires
«GASOLINE, Apocalypse 1998», «the category is: phone sex», «zona nudista», «(fête) sentimental-e-s» : étés d'apocalypse, émojis banane, cruising transocéanique, SMS en short, sales coeurs, baraques à frissons et grand-huit sentimental... ces poèmes courent toustes ~ à genoux, à nu ou en solex ~ après la question du désir, après l'amour aussi, avec une tendre obsession
Design graphique signé Auriane Preud’homme, Enz@ Le Garrec, Roxanne Maillet & Martha Salimbeni, avec des dessins de Gaëlle Loth
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck
Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.
In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.
With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.
This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.
Protoplasmic Flow
One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.
Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.
Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.
Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.
All Ah We is One: Caribbean Carnival Costume
Caribbean Carnivals have been taking place around the UK since 1959. These joyous celebrations of culture and community began as acts of resistance in the face of enslavement — a defiant stand from communities who refused to lose who they were and where they came from.
Drawing from this rich and radical history, Aisling Serrant explores Carnival through one of its most vibrant and unmissable features: costume. First turned to by former slaves in the Caribbean as an act of reclamation and quiet resistance, with roots in West African and European masquerade alike, the colourful costumes of Carnival weekend remain a vital mode of self-expression, protest, and camaraderie. From Canboulay to Leeds and Notting Hill, the costume makers, wearers, and the communities they attract, embody Carnival in the spirit of an expression used across the Caribbean to signify unity among nations and peoples: all ah we is one.
Appendix Project
Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men.
This new edition will feature essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis, who adapted the book to music with TM Davy in 2017 for a performance at the New Museum, and activist filmmaker Tourmaline.