Books

Faut-il cautionner la prostitution pour soutenir les travailleuses du sexe ? Faut-il pénaliser les clients ? La prostituée est-elle le symbole de l'oppression des femmes ? Juno Mac & Molly Smith posent un regard nouveau sur ces questions souvent conflictuelles. Elles rejettent l'alternative entre condamnation et glorification du travail du sexe, et étendent leur propos à des problématiques plus larges : les frontières, l'exploitation, le sexisme et la suprématie blanche. En délaissant les symboles passionnés et en examinant les effets concrets des différents régimes législatifs, elles démontrent que la lutte des travailleuses du sexe est d'une importance capitale pour le mouvement social.

the netherlands has been the home of irishman charlie jermyn for the last 5 years; it’s a nation that has been dredged up from the water and which attempts, to this day, to hold back the persistent tide. in this brilliant and very-hard-to-describe debut novel, jermyn brings the common and absurd to crisp, shimmering life through his essays and short non-fiction pieces, reminding us to take note of the mad and brilliant world around us before the tide comes in again.

illustrated by samuel van heijningen

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in.

It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage.

Translated by Susan de Muth, preface by Pierre Mac Orlan, essay by Amelia Groom.

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

The Chroma Series lists elements of reality and systematically changes their color to evoke monochrome universes. The resulting poems may be conceived as mental films where quick-change art coexists with nonsense and politics.

A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature. 

The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon's 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine's coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine's story.

Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon's allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of "illegal writing" where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.

Introduction by Chad W. Post

Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) started out as a house painter but went on to become the author of a large and rich oeuvre spanning several genres: from the compelling historical epics he composed later in life to his sharp, witty work as a newspaper columnist and his tongue-in-cheek, scabrous novels. Boon is one of the most important writers of Flemish literature in the twentieth century, a keen observer of society, the individual and the interplay between them.

Adrienne Dixon is a translator of Dutch and Flemish literature.

Chad W. Post is the founder and publisher of Open Letter Books. He is also the editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press, where he was formerly the associate director. Over the course of his career, he founded the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, multiple literary podcasts (Two Month Review, Three Percent), the Three Percent website, and currently writes two newsletters: The Three Percent Problem, and Mining the Dalkey Archive. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications. In 2018 he received the Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. 

Nowhere Near follows the author’s psychogeographic journey from Los Angeles to Pangasinan to Mexico City after his departure from the United States, where he lived undocumented for twenty-six years. Returning to the Philippines with his grandmother to search for lost land and to confront a “family curse,” Revereza surfaces legacies of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism as they bear out in its continued present. Through film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative, Nowhere Near excavates the amnesias and silences that shape personal and historical memory in the exilic, diasporic impasse.

Miko Revereza's Nowhere Near is the 2021 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge John Keene.

About the author

Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFI’s Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, London. 

Praise

In his powerful and entrancing voice, fueled by irony and critique, Miko Revereza explores neoliberal capitalism, the challenges facing undocumented families, the non-existent “American dream,” and internal and external exile, showing how borders of all kinds (geographical, racial, psychic), though regularly traversed, are policed and criminalized. Nowhere Near is a cri de coeur about twenty-first century American society.
—John Keene

Miko Revereza’s captivating book is a companion to his diaristic 2023 feature of the same title, and it is a pleasure to encounter on the page the resonant literary voice he developed while making that film. Befitting its rich entwining of personal and political histories, Nowhere Near contains a wondrous range of modes and moods: raw and revealing one moment, sharply and humorously observant the next, by turns poetic and plainspoken.  
—Dennis Lim

Nowhere Near is a document of lives lived undocumented. Here, form matters: text branches out from image, while dialogue counterpoints an easy, self-reflexive poetic. With the acuity necessitated by a status requiring constant vigilance, negotiating the privatized avenues of America’s dream, Revereza’s words carry a weight that belies their simplicity. Here and now, our attention matters, as America’s icy grip chills us all.
—Alia Syed

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

the second poetry collection from Natalie Briggs titled ‘FLOWER ENGINE’. This collection of cinched, bright free-verse explores the passing locations of love and the slow, private operations of pain’s knocking counterweight. The book extends Briggs’ relay of concise universal suggestions, translating them through brief, intimate utility. 

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

The first full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature.

Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was a rare and almost inconceivable a celebrity experimental writer. Twenty-five years after her death, she remains one of the most original, shocking, and controversial artists of her era. The author of visionary, transgressive novels like Blood and Guts in High School ; Empire of the Senses ; and Pussy, King of Pirates , Acker wrote obsessively about the treachery of love, the limitations of language, and the possibility of revolution.

She was notorious for her methods—collaging together texts stolen from other writers with her own diaries, sexual fantasies, and blunt political critique—as well as her appearance. With her punkish hairstyles, tattoos, and couture outfits, she looked like no other writer before or after. Her work was exceptionally prescient, taking up complicated conversations about gender, sex, capitalism, and colonialism that continue today.

toffe. édition générale
publication issue de reproduction générale,
système de production d'actions graphiques
développé en trois temps :
projection générale
dispositif multi-écran, pour la chaufferie
galerie de l'école supérieure des arts décoratifs de strasbourg
du 14 février au 23 mars 2003
présentation, édition générale
école nationale supérieure des beaux-arts d'alger
du 24 mai 2003
exposition, occurrence récente
diffusion, édition générale
galerie madé, paris
du 12 mai au 5 juin 2003

This publication presents a survey of the work of Els Dietvorst from 2010 to 2014. This is also the period in which she left Brussels to live in a village on the south-east coast of Ireland, where she focused on projects such as The Black Lamb. The audio piece One was killed for beauty, another one was shot, the two others died naturally is included on an audio CD.

Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014), Rolf Quaghebeur, Eva Wittocx, Katleen Weyts, Els Dietvorst, Brussels, 2014.

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.

Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.

The publication of the winners of the Villa Romana Prize has taken the shape of four distinct yet interrelated booklets – an editorial series continuing the tradition of the institution to offer a space for the dissemination and reverberation of the research and work of the Villa Romana Fellows after their ten-months residency in Florence.

Each year, four selected artists are invited to live and work in the same house that, since 1905, generations of artists have continuously inhabited. They always come as a group – a constellation of four people – but all as singular artists. The opportunity of yearly publishing their work in a bundle of four separate books and within an open series allows for a larger combination of echoes across the generations of Villa Romana Fellows. A further occasion for “being singular plural.”

Contributions by Elena Agudio

Publication including the films Transformation Scenario, 70.001, and Faux Terrain, as well as a visual essay, a glossary and texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, and Franciska Zólyom.

“When I visited the Elias Canetti archive at the Zentralbibliothek Zurich, I was looking for manuscripts and sketches for his major work Crowds and Power (1960). I imagined that Canetti must have made drawings, as the behaviour of the various crowd types he identified was described in such detail. I hoped that these drawings would help me transfer the group behaviour he describes to virtual figures in an animated film.

The archive of manuscripts, arranged by Elias Canetti himself, was handed over to the Zurich library and contains the notes and sketches he completed during the development of Crowds and Power, a period of almost forty years. However, in this context I found no drawings—Canetti had only made graphic lists on various themes. So where did Canetti's precise descriptions of the scenes come from?”

Clemens von Wedemeyer (born 1974 in Göttingen, lives and works in Berlin) creates films, videos and media installations poised between reality and fiction, reflecting power structures in social relations, history and architecture.

Edited by Fanni Fetzer and Franciska Zólyom.
Texts by Heike Geißler, Fanni Fetzer, Franciska Zólyom.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

The bilingual book ‘Aesopica’ documents and extends Rūta Junevičiūtė’s research on the Aesopian language and the influence of political censorship to contemporary collective body, first presented in 2020 as the eponymous solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and as a permanent outdoor installation at the Rupert Art Center, Vilnius. 

Taking as a starting point the historical phenomenon of Aesopian language, which was widespread in Lithuanian culture during the Soviet era, and in parts of the Russian Empire as early as the 19th century, Junevičiūtė aims to investigate the interrelationship between generations, the gray zones of collective identity creation and the processes of (un)censoring the archives of our bodies.

Aesopian language – a term coined after Ancient Greek fabulist Aesop (gr. Aísōpos), is a type of cryptic communication system, where a text has several layers of meaning often contradictory to each other and which seek to convey official and subversive hidden meanings simultaneously. It is usually employed under conditions of omnipresent state censorship to communicate officially forbidden or taboo subjects and opinions. As a system it contains three members – an author, a censor, and a reader. It uses various modes of circumlocution and euphemisation, innuendo and poetic paraphrasing, which can also be seen as an aesthetic style. It has been advocated for artistic benefits as poetics of omissions, concealment, and travesty. On the other hand, it has been criticized as a sign of conformity and humiliation. In Lithuania, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been popularly regarded as a position of dissent, but such an interpretation received criticism from contemporary scholars. “Such a mode of expression is probably as old as censorship itself” – a historian told us.

Text contributors: Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Rūta Junevičiūtė, Goshka Macuga, Anastasia Sosunova, Grėtė Šmitaitė, Tomas Venclova, Ana Vujanović

Language editors: Dangė Vitkienė, Aira Niauronytė, Gemma Lloyd

Translators: Alexandra Bondarev, Erika Lastovskytė, Justinas Šuliokas, Mantė Zagurskytė-Tamulevičienė, Aistis Žekevičius.

Illustrations: Rūta Junevičiūtė.

Grace Crowley is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorised by Riet Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’ and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.

Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.

Metropolitan Voids Agency is the first monographic publication dedicated to the collected works of artist Margherita Moscardini. The book recounts the work carried out by Moscardini spanning seventeen years, between 2008 and 2024, inviting a reading of her practice in its entirety as an investigation into ‘urban voids’: those which Moscardini has recognized and designated as voids, or those she has herself invented in the urban fabric.

Vanus übermann des villes, le roi de la ville, le roi du monde, se fait des odes à lui-même et met ses chaussettes dans la pâte à pain. Sophie Couderc raconte quelques-unes de ses péripéties.

Vanus übermann of the cities, the king of the city, the king of the world, writes odes to himself and puts his socks in bread dough. Sophie Couderc recounts some of his adventures.

Je jette le matelas dehors, il rebondit sur trois cons et tombe dans une grosse flaque de jus de rue. Ok, pas mal mais il m’en faut plus. (Vanus)

Carie, comme le trou qu’on bouche au plomb, est une collection de textes courts et moyens qui se glissent dans la poche. Chaque livre (la dent) de la collection (la bouche) est troué (la carie) et cerclé d’un œillet métallique (le plombage).

Carie, like the hole filled with lead, is a collection of short and medium-length texts that slip into the pocket. Each book (the tooth) in the collection (the mouth) is holed (the cavity) and circled with a metal eyelet (the filling).

Petrit Halilaj and Danh Vo in conversation; Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman, Nour Abuzaid, and Elizabeth Breiner); Gabrielle Goliath; Edward W. Said; Shumon Basar; Dani Blanga Gubbay; Yvonne Rainer; Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein; Tobias Pils; Travis Jeppesen...

Collective intelligence (along with its wildly popular counterpart, brain rot) is a recurring subject of late. This issue is woven together through reflections on methodologies of the collective, larger-than-ourselves dynamics and "what goes unuttered (of, perhaps, what is painfully unutterable)," as Zoé Samudzi writes about Gabrielle Goliath—whose project for the South African pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale has been cancelled by the Arts and Culture Minister of her country for being "divisive." We stand in solidarity with the artist. Forensic Architecture's Eyal Weizman speaks of new ways of detecting "hyper-relations" as strategies to confront systemic violence. Edward W. Said, in his crucial 1993 essay "Speaking Truth to Power" (reprinted here), argues that "the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance because it associates itself freely with [. . .] the common pursuit of a shared ideal." And in our Curators section, Shumon Basar memetically reaffirms that now more than ever, "Comment is king."
Let's not shy away from commenting.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.