Books

Violet and Rainer, over the course of a long phone call, become hosts of an imaginary literary summit where attendees spar over casualwear, animal metaphors, fascist art, bodily autonomy, and other problems of the everyday. A collaborative work of friendship as much as the occasion for philosophical scholarship, where one can find the answers to burning questions like: What makes sex good? What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone? What does my nipple piercing mean for your nipples? And how have you been, lately?

Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman’s only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work – a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid – the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman’s work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity.

This edition features facsimile images of the story’s handwritten drafts from Jarman’s archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman’s throughout the period of the story’s writing.

Real Estate Portfolio by Claire Barrow
7 panel concertina + covers / total of 16 pages 
9.6 × 14 cm folded / 98 cm extended
Riso 250gsm recycled offset exterior, litho 135gsm recycled offset interior 
Glassine sleeve, digitally printed on the front & back

Self-published edition of 300, signed by the artist
Constructed in the UK (£0.016 per cm²)

The zine was drawn in one session using the right wrong hand.

A performance text by Jozef Wouters, The Soft Layer traces and proposes visions and words that enfold the historic building of Dar Bairam Turki in Tunis like a cloak. How can we imagine possible futures for such a place and the community inhabiting it, beyond nostalgia and the spectres of the past? Several voices muse in three languages (Tunisian, French and English) on renovation and history, destruction and cleansing, the limits of science-fiction and the soothing quality of aloe vera.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition May 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN 978-82-691492-4-1

What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive “we” encounters “hunger in two places at once.

The Wide Road is a collaborative investigation of the female body, friendship, writing, community, activism, travel and the nature and possibility of human thinking.

Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, two of the most honored innovators of language, began writing The Wide Road in 1991. Over the following twenty-years, the co-writing occurred in turn by letters, by walking, in cabins, together and apart, and finally together again. The reader of this original and major work will find that it is no longer possible to distinguish who wrote what. Instead, one finds a joyful new feminist voice breaking out new possibilities for the future of writing.

The event of the making-writing of this book is now matched by the event of the making-book object of the book, for which the artist Nancy Blum drew two botanical panels, the fruit and the flower of the strawberry tree. HR Hegnauer, in discussion with editor, Rachel Levitsky and the authors, came up with two designs, and in celebration of the book’s multiple origins, Belladonna* Collaborative printed both!

The English translation of Zdanevich's Dadaist autobiographical lecture in Paris in 1922, where he adopts the name Iliazda. In this entertaining lecture, the achievements of the avant-garde is presented as a combination of zaum, polymorphous sexuality, aleatory forms and scatological interpretation of culture.

The second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich's artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colourful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse. 

Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd's letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich's positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich—a "fellow traveller" in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualised with Johanna Drucker's visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult.

The bie bao series will include eight publications, covering many layers of Zdanevich's rich theoretical and artistic output. Each volume consists of a bio-bibliographical introduction, a commentary, a translation with annotations, and artistic intervention.

Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich, 1894-1975) was a Russian poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, art critic, and publisher, close to the avant-garde circles and one of the promoters of Futurism in Russia, author of a poetic work, drama written in zaum abstract poetic trans-sense or "transrational" language, and novels.

Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex is a meditation on the cultural obsession with the bodies of dead women and an occult invocation of the artist Francesca Woodman. Like Woodman’s photographs with their long exposures and blurred lenses, this book is haunted and haunting, hazy yet devastatingly precise. These are poems as possessions, gothic ekphrases, dialogues with the dead, biography and anti-biography, a stunning act of “cryptobeauty.”

Molecular typography is the study of the chemical and physical underpinnings of letters. All characters are formed from seven basic atomic building blocks, known as typtoms. These typtoms come together in various combinations and configurations to form letters, numbers, and punctuation. Typtoms are not just theoretical tools for exploring the anatomy of type, but actual particles. Letters are molecules.

H.F. Henderson’s work, Understanding Molecular Typography, originally published in 1992, was a seminal work in the field. By condensing information pulled from nearly forty years of publications from the top molecular typographic scientists, Henderson made the science approachable to the everyday American for the first time. Part primer, part field guide, it lays out the basic principles, followed by detailed diagrams of the molecular formation of letters, numbers, and punctuation. A conclusion sums up the field of molecular typography to date, and a comprehensive bibliography provides valuable reference for the reader looking to learn more.

With the demise of the field of molecular typography as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘90s, (perhaps even due to its increased popularity brought on by Henderson’s work), Understanding Molecular Typography ran out of print, and has long since been forgotten. Peculiar as it may be, molecular typography is nevertheless a science worthy of being brought back to mainstream attention, if for no other reason than demonstrating humanity’s frequent scientific misconceptions throughout history. This reprint edition, with a new introduction by Woody Leslie, seeks to do just that.

"Until Henderson's incredible analysis, no one had created a conceptual framework sophisticated enough to do the analytic work in graphical physics that the alphabet required if it was to be fully understood. True, some of the Russian futurists, like Ilia Zdanevich, in their examinations of the properties of language, had begun to grasp the vague outlines of a modern scientific approach to molecular components, to the formation of compounds, and their behavior as chemical substances, within the structure of poetics. But Henderson's research was comprehensive and the results nothing short of astonishing." —Johanna Drucker

Pour les révolutionnaires des deux derniers siècles, l’accumulation du capital devait unifier la classe ouvrière sous la bannière du sujet révolutionnaire. Le mouvement ainsi né était appelé à renverser la société de classes et les clivages divisant les prolétaires. Mais le mouvement de la valeur a finalement triomphé, pour donner naissance à la société de la séparation. L’atomisation a pris le pas sur les puissances du rassemblement. La civilisation du capital traverse aujourd’hui une crise sans fin, mais les forces capables de la défaire brillent par leur absence.

Ces textes tirés de la revue Endnotes, réunis pour la première fois en français, dessinent la carte d’un présent ponctué de paysages désindustrialisés, de centres logistiques et de bidonvilles où s’entassent les populations rejetées aux marges de l’accumulation – autant de coordonnées nécessaires pour continuer à penser le dépassement du capitalisme : une fois encore, reprendre le chantier de l’hypothèse communiste.

Endnotes est une revue théorique communiste produite par un groupe de discussion du même nom basé en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis.

Traduction: Pablo Arnaud
Préface: Aaron Benanav Et John Clegg

Encre verte pour tableaux noirs. Vingt-sept poèmes de Timothée Trouche (maître d’hôtel et instituteur) compilés avec la complicité de Teddy Coste (groom et solitaire).

A rich and moving epistolary memoir about transgender childhood, sexual trauma, motherhood, and a young queer life in 1970s Argentina.

In these hilarious and heartbreaking letters, Cecilia Gentili reinvents the trans memoir, putting the confession squarely between the writer and her enemies, paramours and friends.

Writing to childhood figures such as her rapist’s daughter, her father’s mistress, her best friend, and her mother, Gentili probes deeply into the bitter cruelty, buried secrets, and delicious gossip of a small town. 

Is she here for revenge, or forgiveness? Both! And more! A story of sex, theft, murder, motherhood, and outrageous fashion choices, Faltas is a beautiful, messy meditation on what it takes to heal, and even grow.

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.

In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.

Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University, and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

Made in 1969 but never published, Terminal Boundaries is an artist book by Lawrence Weiner, a sculptor whose medium was language. The manuscript for the publication, which was recently brought to light, contains two related bodies of work represented as typewritten statements on paper that Weiner pasted to the pages of a small composition notebook. The book’s absence from Weiner’s oeuvre plagued him as it marked a terminus of his relationship to the physical construction of his artworks, and illustrated the principle of “specific” and “general” which he applied to his art.

Created from a standard notebook purchased in a stationery store, the manuscript is two books in one: Terminal Boundaries and A natural watercourse diverted reduced or displaced. A tête-bêche with two front covers, the book can begin from either cover by turning it upside down.

Weiner was a traveler by nature and the materials he refers to in these works are those that one can encounter on a road trip. The artist was traveling across Europe when this manuscript was composed. Struck by the tumultuous times and the critical illuminations about the climate from the Club of Rome discussions, the works in this book are in Weiner’s words, “concerned with the relationship of natural resources in relation to human beings.” Distinct from his contemporaries associated with the Land Art movement, in Terminal Boundaries and A natural water course diverted reduced or displaced, Weiner constructs his landscape interventions in language—the specific and/or general act and the location are stated—offering the reader/viewer the opportunity to consider each work’s existence, to build it in their mind’s eye. One can only wonder what Weiner did to divert, reduce, or displace a natural water course in Saltsrumen, Norway, the location of the world’s strongest maelstrom, or in nearby Bodø at the site of Svartisen glacier. A work in Terminal Boundaries titled The joining of France Germany and Switzerland by rope demonstrates the geopolitical perspective of Weiner’s land art. Requiring physical and mental borders to be transgressed in performing this work; how and where could this happen?

Terminal Boundaries finds Weiner just off the cusp of his decision to make art that lived centered in language, emphasizing the viewer’s responsibility to engage with it to make it whole. The book marks a crucial inflection point in the artist’s practice, defining his direction to make work that “attempts to present something to people that is not just about me,” but about materials and the world we find ourselves in here and now.

A Congregation of Clouds assembles eight artistic voices in the form of printed matter. These publications do not speak in unison; instead, they drift, accumulate, and resist.

To congregate is to gather—sometimes in quiet reflection, sometimes in protest, sometimes in ritual. Clouds do not ask permission to form. They appear when conditions allow, under a shared sky, without needing to resolve into one.

Edited and designed by Tony Cederteg

"Portrait of the Artist as a Writer" is a collection of short stories, quotes and drawings about dinosaurs, gay lesbians and how to lose a joke at the lake.

Risoprinted in pumpkin and purple, perfect binding with glue, first edition of 300, Berlin 2022.

The new edition of Salinger's ever-relevant series of 1980s and '90s teenagers in their bedrooms. 

Bedrooms contain the past, the present and the future; they are sites of continual transformation. Popular culture and fashion continually change and recycle. While specific objects of decor change over time, teenagers' bedrooms are still private sanctuaries: spaces for safely experimenting during a time in life when one is forming and expressing ever-evolving identities.

Upon its release in 1995, Adrienne Salinger's book In My Room was an immediate success, selling nearly 24,000 copies in its first few years. The continued popularity of this work made in the '80s and '90s is curious. However, over the nearly 30 years since, and especially in the most recent decade of social media, the work's appeal has grown tremendously. In some cases, the work evokes nostalgia, but not primarily so. Adrienne Salinger hears from current teenagers often; many send her pictures of their bedrooms today. Social media encourages users to endlessly "rebrand" their identities, creating idealized fantasies, striving for perfection. These photographs are not about perfection. They give voice to the contradictions of our identities.

Hundreds of print and online articles, interviews and features on In My Room have been published and the work has been exhibited at museums all around the world. Long out of print and now considered a classic, with only a rare few available on the secondary market, the book returns in a new expanded edition as Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. With 26 additional photographs, this treasure is made available once more to new audiences.

Adrienne Salinger has published three photobooks: In My Room (1995), Living Solo (1999) and Middle Aged Men (2007). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. It is as much a practice as it is a methodology or way of thinking, a multifaceted discipline that moves with society’s progression. Throughout the creative process behind every design, learnings happen. Designers learn to adapt, adjusting their positions relative to the context. This volume spotlights self-organised, spontaneous, sporadic, and informal educational initiatives within the realm of creative practices, both historical and contemporary. The initiatives presented here show that any attempt to control a narrative and limit it to a single understanding risks stifling potential innovations that might arise from unexpected origins.

Featuring contributions from Amanda Ariawan, Andriew Budiman, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Chabib Duto Hapsoro, Czar Kristoff J.P., Filippo Sciascia, Fiorent Fernisia, Gideon Kong, Jacob Lindgren, Jeremy Sharma, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Limestone Books, Livian Aurel V. Purwanto, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nishkra, Prananda L. Malasan, R.A. Dita Saraswati, Reza Afisina, Rouzel Waworuntu Saad, Savira Aristi, Trevor Embury, and Virliany Rizqia Putri.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

For years, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi has been mainstreaming the global awareness about the legacy of Russian colonialism. A few days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he started a Twitter thread listing all Russian colonial invasions over the last century and highlighting one specific pattern that they all went by. The post has gone viral and is now dubbed the "mother of all Russian colonialism tweets". Together with a group of Ukrainian artists, Eristavi transformed it into an illustrated pocket guide to the 48 most recent invasions of Russian colonialism — to bring everyone’s attention to a pattern of serial behavior by the largest colonial empire.

Publication is prepared with the support of the MOCA NGO and the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund in collaboration with the Sigrid Rausing Trust. Some illustrations created during the illustrative workshop for the book Russian Colonialism 101 have been donated to the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA).

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man’s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be ‘a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense’; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans. In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington’s short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

Dans l’imaginaire collectif, l’œuf évoque la fragilité et la promesse de vie, tandis que la pierre renvoie à la permanence et à la disparition. Cette édition tente de déplacer cette opposition à travers une forme fragmentaire. Il rassemble des notes écrites au fil du temps. Sa production suit cette logique : imprimé en offset, le projet prend en compte les formats de papier afin d’en optimiser l’usage. Les chutes sont utilisées dans un cahier complémentaire, rassemblant textes et images laissés en marge. La reliure, cousue à la main au fil de coton, reste simple et légère. L’objet se conçoit comme quelque chose à manipuler et découvrir, entre publication et transmission plus intime. 

« J’ai donc cherché une forme simple, en évitant tout formalisme superflu. Le projet repose sur une question : est-il nécessaire de produire ce type d’objet, et pourquoi ? » 

In the collective imagination, the egg suggests fragility and the promise of life, while stone evokes permanence and disappearance. This edition seeks to move beyond this opposition through a fragmentary form. It gathers notes written over time. Its production follows the same logic: printed in offset, the project takes paper formats into account in order to optimize their use. Offcuts are used in a supplementary section, gathering texts and images left aside. The binding is hand-sewn with cotton thread, remaining simple and lightweight. The object is conceived as something to handle and discover, between publication and a more intimate form of transmission. 

“So I sought a simple form, avoiding unnecessary formalism. The project rests on a question: is it necessary to produce this type of object, and why?”

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.

Special edition: 100 out of 300 books are reworked by making cutouts in the book.