Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

A dialogue between Camille Henrot's images and Estelle Hoy's texts, a visual and verbal exploration of melancholy, failure, injustice, and hope.

Since late 2021, the artists, united by a close friendship, have been sharing hundreds of images and exchanging thousands of messages via WhatsApp, Instagram, shared Google Docs, voice messages, and live conversations. Result of this correspondence, Jus d'Orange includes a series of Henrot's paintings inspired by Hoy's texts and vice versa.

This editorial project, developed together with the artists, is thus a homage to this mutual and continual contamination between their works, and to the personal and professional relationship between them.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2023.

Pisti, 80 rue de Belleville is Estelle Hoy’s latest novel.

Elke is a young academic with a troubled past that keeps spilling onto her present. Just as she is about to leave town for a writing retreat, she meets Pisti, a charismatic, hard-boiled but luscious Hungarian left activist, who runs an anarchist collective in Paris. Over one night in a Belleville apartment, old friends and new lovers discuss–and act–polyamory, politics, and the art of conversation.

A wry exploration of the seductive allure of tropes and cliché in the art world and politics, Pisti is also an experiment in writing, shamelessly flirting with namedropping and appropriation. The character of Pisti was appropriated from Chris Kraus’ novel Torpor.

Pisti and it's blasphemy against the left and art world is not apostasy, but rather a stepping away from a teleological view of politics and instead, a radical reimagining of the role of incompatibilities, partial identities, cliché and perhaps ultimately, the unresolvedness of hypocrisy.   Which is to say, not taking things too seriously, in order to take them seriously. - Estelle Hoy