Books

A comprehensive overview of the unique work of the Italian artist born in 1931 and "discovered" late on the international scene, with numerous texts and an interview.

Published after the eponymous exhibition at Consortium Museum, Dijon, April 26th – September 8th 2024.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1931, Isabella Ducrot is a young artist with a young career. Like many women of her generation, she moved into art after raising her children. Her formative years were marked by continuous travels with her late husband, during which they amassed hundreds of Persian miniatures and rare antique textiles of many kinds.

Contributions by Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim, Verena Lueken, Tobias Pils, Tschabalala Self, Andrea Viliani, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

this simulation sux is a collection of speculative essays and personal observations commissioned by global cultural institutions and local counterculture zines between February 2020 and April 2021.

"During the moment of pause brought on by the initial lockdown, we chose to write as a form of self care and mediated therapy; writing, for us, is a way to process, orient, and grasp for a moment of clarity in the ever changing media and cultural landscape. In this informational era, in which our attention is in very high demand, the amount of content we are expected to consume is endless. Beset with political unrest, economic uncertainty, and waning emotional bandwidth, we have become datapoints in the vast and saturated marketplace presented to us as “society.”

[...]

Flânerie, the French term describing the act of walking and observing, became a part of our daily ritual; we lapped the outer edges of the island of Manhattan and exploring various neighborhoods during the peak of the pandemic. The images presented on this book’s jacket were captured on these walks, documenting the absurdities of everyday life in this fraying simulation. Personal, anecdotal narratives of an imagined reality are represented through the images, which are placed alongside our speculative observations derived from historical data.

We hope that these writings can provide others with prose and information that can be applied like an antidotal balm to treat our communal ailment of future shock."

—Ting Ding 丁汀 & DeForrest Brown, Jr. 

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

From award-winning writer Sarah Schulman, a longtime social activist and outspoken critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, comes a brilliant examination of the inherent psychological and social challenges to solidarity movements, and what that means for the future. 

For those who seek to combat injustice, solidarity with the oppressed is one of the highest ideals, yet it does not come without complication. In this searing yet uplifting book, award-winning writer and cultural critic Sarah Schulman delves into the intricate and often misunderstood concept of solidarity to provide a new vision for what it means to engage in this work—and why it matters. 

To grapple with solidarity, Schulman writes, we must recognize its inherent fantasies. Those being oppressed dream of relief, that a bystander will intervene though it may not seem to be in their immediate interest to do so, and that the oppressor will be called out and punished. Those standing in solidarity with the oppressed are occluded by a different fantasy: that their intervention is effective, that it will not cost them, and that they will be rewarded with friendship and thanks. Neither is always the case, and yet in order to realize our full potential as human beings in relation with others, we must continue to pursue action towards these shared goals. 

Within this framework, Schulman examines a range of case studies, from the fight for abortion rights in post-Franco Spain, to NYC’s AIDS activism in the 1990s, to the current wave of campus protest movements against Israel’s war on Gaza, and her own experience growing up as a queer female artist in male dominated culture industries. Drawing parallels between queer, Palestinian, feminist, and artistic struggles for justice, Schulman challenges the traditional notion of solidarity as a simple union of equals, arguing that in today’s world of globalized power structures, true solidarity requires the collaboration of bystanders and conflicted perpetrators with the excluded and oppressed. That action comes at a cost, and is not always effective. And yet without it we sentence ourselves to a world without progressive change towards visions of liberation. 

By turns challenging, inspiring, pragmatic, and poetic, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity provides a much-needed path for how we can work together to create a more just, more equitable present and future.

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"[…] this new poetry will not serve the taste of the prosperous class. which only represents a minority. The people who populate this earth find the right to live at the end of a constant struggle. Like everything else, they also have a right to poetry, and it will appeal to their taste."

Three friends —Orhan Veli Kanik, Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat— followed this principle as they were composing their "odd" poems. Their aim was to write poetry for everyone, about everyone.

This books gathers the poems Orhan Veli published with his friends in Odd (1941), the manifesto he wrote for this new poetry, and the foreword he wrote for the 1945 re-edition.

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

High Shine is boek zes van de groeiende collectie van De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek en boek nul van de Notebooks die opgezet zijn door de fellows van THIRD, het derde cyclus onderzoeksprogramma van DAS Graduate School, ondersteund door DAS Publishing (lectoraat van de Academie voor Theater en Dans) en gefinancierd door de Quality Funds.

Als co-publicatie van DAS Publishing en De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek, luidt High Shine een nieuw partnerschap in tussen nieuwe platforms en oude vrienden.

Fugue is published on the occasion of the eponymous duo exhibition by artists Aaron Amar Bhamra and Céline Mathieu, presented at Jester in Genk, Belgium. The title, derived from the Latin fuga (flight), evokes both its musical and psychological meanings: a contrapuntal compositional technique and a state of dissociation. These dual connotations—aural and mental—resonate throughout the exhibition and this accompanying publication.

Céline Mathieu's work moves between the sensory and the conceptual, integrating multiple media to explore the circulation of thoughts and materials in relation to specific sites. Aaron Amar Bhamra's practice draws on recurring forms and materials to construct evolving personal and social archives, often reactivating exhibition spaces by engaging with their historical contexts.

In addition to documenting the exhibition, the publication features an introduction by Jester's artistic director Koi Persyn, a visual score of a sound composition by Charlie Usher, written contributions by Céline Mathieu, curator Eloise Sweetman, and researcher Johanna Schindler, as well as a series of analog photographs by Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Contributions by Koi Persyn, Céline Mathieu, Charlie Usher, Eloise Sweetman, Johanna Schindler, Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Austrian artist Aaron Amar Bhamra (born 1992) often procures exhibition spaces that subtly expose their systematics and physical experience by incorporating imprints reminiscent of other spaces or past exhibitions. He occasionally uses recurring forms and materials, weaving a site of shifting personal and social archives.

Céline Mathieu (born 1989) is a Belgian artist and writer. Her practice is often site and condition specific, using sound, scent, sculpture, performance, text and different materials in performative installations. The work is both sensory and conceptual. Her work looks into the circulation of thoughts and materials. Material and economic cycles merge with hyper-personal items, resulting in fluid work that cannot quite be pinned down.

Peach machine comprises nine months of poems, tracing a recurrent cycle of sickness, heartbreak, reparation, and recovery from late summer back into early Spring. The work is roughshod: grieving, oxygen-starved, jetlagged, reflective, and relieved.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

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.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Child’s Replay is a hallucinatory homecoming. As we follow THE CHILD in a series of private re-enactments, the present self is revealed as the past’s fragile construction. Pursuing the banality of trauma, a first-person character juxtaposes childhood events with internal misrepresentations, reflections on the emotional toll of migration, psychoanalytic theory, Brazilian history, and literary criticism. An exploration of the impact that language and fiction have on real bodies, Child’s Replay assembles a hybrid portrait of memory and anti-memory. 

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author. 

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

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?

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. — Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. — Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024

For decades, Fanny Howe has been the great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, completed just before her death, she assembled a selection of her writing from the last thirty years into a single, astonishing work.

Fanny Howe is a titan. Absolutely nobody writes like her. Nobody sounds like her. This Poor Book is a miracle she left for us. —Kaveh Akbar

This Poor Book is revelatory and casts Howe’s poetry in a new light, and for those who don’t know her work already, this is a perfect introduction. Fanny Howe is an essential poet. —Rae Armantrout

Fanny Howe spoke about “the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms.” In This Poor Book she delineates and shifts between these layers to conjure a bewildering yet ultimately galvanizing evocation of the human psyche. We are being warned every day that robots and software will soon replace us. Howe’s poetry makes clear that such a notion is based upon a very limited conception of what it is to be a human. We are complex. We are mysterious. We don’t make sense. We do make sense. You will lose and you will find yourself in her words. — Claire-Louise Bennett

This Poor Book is a testament to Fanny Howe’s life and writing. In it, she wields her powers of perception for a long poem that turns inward on the self and out at the world and in every other direction the poet can imagine with lines that speak directly and always suggest more than they say: “There is a little trouble in my eye.” The irony and beauty of its final line—“There was no more reason to die”—will be with me for as long as my memory of Fanny Howe herself. — Jericho Brown

In her final act of literary alchemy, Fanny Howe gathers the scattered constellations of her astonishing life work and forges them into a single unwavering spiritual reckoning. At the dynamic center of the poem, a live beating heart moves through a fractured world—haunted by power, estranged from institutions, yet fiercely open to mystery. There’s a radical humility here, paired with a radiant understanding—that doubt can be a form of faith, and that hope, when unflinching, is the most defiant music of all. This Poor Book is for the ages. — Peter Gizzi

This Poor Book is an astonishing document by an irreplaceable poet. A palimpsest of decades’ worth of writing, assembled here into a long poem as fractured and multitudinous as life itself, Fanny Howe’s last work captures the brutality and beauty of the modern world better than almost anything else I’ve read: “The structure failed to cohere at the end of the struggle. / It had some music in it.” — Maggie Millner

Through Fanny Howe's eyes we look at life differently. She makes us understand that we are part of a mysterious and complex world; one which we urgently need to be receptive to. Beauty appears in unexpectedness, as in “flowers attract scissors” and “why does an eye evolve in the dark?” Who else could turn things upside down with such a sleight of hand? This Poor Book reads like the testament of a newly discovered life-form, offering vital messages from the past and into the future. — Celia Paul

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. — Adam Phillips

This gorgeous final statement by one of our most perceptual writers is a work of accrued understanding. ... Fanny Howe leaves us with profound investigations into the capacity of words, of juxtaposition, what a line, a page, and a book can give. — Sarah Schulman

In this special edition, double-cover issue of Worms, we bring you not one, but two cover stars. The  indelible Tyson Yunkaporta and the iconic Anne Waldman adorn both sides of Worms 8 which can also be thought of as ‘The Elements Issue’. It was dreamt up in a dreary and grey August in London, while the rest of the world suffered through the hottest days on record. As we witnessed, and continue to witness, such climate catastrophe, we turned to the literature we love to help us understand, to challenge us, and to offer us some comfort. 

The issue is split into four sections—earth, fire, air and water—but its roots and webs push beyond what we typically think of as ‘the natural’: tales from the kitchen from Rebecca May Johnson and Slutty Cheff, reflections on gardening and colonialism, writer's block and clogged pipes, how to blow up pipelines with Andreas Malm, grief and writing, recovery and nature with Octavia Bright, social mobility with Isabel Waidner, the wide range of issues raised by the underrepresentation of First Nations people in literature with Evelyn Araluen and much, much more. 

We hope that this issue can be a flame of hope, inspiration, or something that simply sustains in such turbulent times.

Featuring 
Tyson Yunkaporta, Isabel Waidner , Jamaica Kincaid, Melissa Broder , Evelyn Araluen, Bruce Pascoe, Octavia Bright, Nora Treatbaby , Nerea Calvillo , Anne Waldman , Alexis Pauline Gumbs , Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeline Cash , Andreas Malm, Rebecca May Johnson 

Contributors
Stella Murphy , Ben Redhead, Phoenix Yemi, Sam Moore, Devils Claws, Pierce Eldridge, Manon Mikolaitis, Caitlin McLoughlin, Isabel MacCarthy, Elodie Saint-Louis , Nettle Grellier, Amelia Abraham, Ryan Pfluger, Rose Higham-Stainton , Emma Crabtree, Ignota, Lydia Luke, Chloe Sheppard , Clem MacLeod , Carolyne Loreé Teston , Emma Cohen, Olive Couri, Raheela Suleman , No Land , Jacqueline Ennis-Cole , Sufia Ikbal-Doucet, Rhett Hammerton, Zara Joan Miller , Kate Morgan , Bug Shepherd-Barron, Zoe Freilich , Slutty Cheff , Clemmie Bache , Violet Conroy , Sarah White , Jemima Skala , Stephanie Francis-Shanahan

What do you call a memoir that isn’t? In This Is Not a Memoir, Janette Parris incisively narrates a journey through lost high street landmarks of East and South London in a series of detailed artworks blending map, archive and anecdote with deadpan humour. Part graphic novel, part recollection, and accompanied by an in-conversation between Janette Parris and Gilane Tawadros, this is an intimate exploration of what it means to have ownership of public space, from Wimpy to Woolworth’s via Canning Town. And somewhere in the gaps, in absent moments caught gazing at the sky or a kerbside, an impression of a life emerges–or is that just what she wants you to think?

“This book by Janette Parris tells a deflationary yet expressive coming-of-age story in the East End of London. While it may seem fun and superficial, its considerable power lies in how it moves through memories and moments in a witty and light-footed way presented as a roman-à-clef. This Is Not a Memoir is particular in the way it conjures a world of the 1970s and 1980s that is lost to most of London, yet still resonates with what it means to grow up as a working class young woman who ends up at art school and becomes an artist. It is a brave book to make, but one that will be remembered.”
— Rachel Garfield, artist, Professor of Fine Art at the Royal College of Art and author of Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s (2021)

Janette Parris is an artist who investigates the contemporary urban experience, using narrative, humour and popular formats including soap opera, stand-up comedy, musical theatre, pop mu-sic, cartoons, comics and animation. Parris has exhibited widely nationally and internationally for 25 years at spaces including TATE, The New Art Gallery Walsall, ICA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hay-ward Gallery Touring, Art on the Underground and Royal Academy of Arts.

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect.

The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin.

75 numbered copies +
screenprinted newsprints’ fragment
24 pages / color plates
book size 21 x 14,5 cm
papers fedrigoni sirio rough pearl 210 and arena white rough 120

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

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.

First monograph dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno, this publication introduces some of the many ways Giorno wove poetry into all aspects of daily life—by putting words on the wall, on the performance stage, on LP vinyl records, or on the telephone, in the context of the iconic Dial-A-Poem, one of his most celebrated works. A wide range of archival documents, images, and ephemera also form an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator, and friend.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous retrospective exhibition at the MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, in 2026.

Emerging from the New York downtown scene of the 1960s, John Giorno (1936–2019) developed a singular artistic voice at the crossroads of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism over the course of more than six decades. By bringing the written word off the page and into performance, technology, and visual art, Giorno consistently challenged disciplinary boundaries and advanced a radical vision of language as central to human expression. Though often positioned at the margins of multiple downtown scenes—the Beats, Andy Warhol's Factory, punk music, queer counterculture, anti-war activism—he was in fact an influential presence within all of them, operating as a conduit between coexisting cultural communities. His collaborators included Robert Rauschenberg, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.