Confidences / Baseline plays with the vampire novel like a dollhouse. Charac­ters who variously believe in the power of theatre and performance become entangled with grief, desire, and the un­known. What does a rehearsal come to mean when a vampire lives forever?

Baseline is the first in a series of books that fetishise nightclubs for their inaccessibility. Deluded realities antici­pate the transformative sensuality of penetration. In his second novel, artist Ivan Cheng maintains his fixation on structures for audiences between public and private.

Designed by Sabo Day
Book cover by Özgür Kar
Back cover photography by Nikola Lamburov
TLTRPreß, Berlin 2021
ISBN: 978-3-9819640-5-9
176 pages, 117 x 164mm, edition of 40,2kg

About Ivan Cheng:
The performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. They use his variously trained performing body, incanting texts that foreground subjectivity in monologues and dialogues. Identities of other interlocutors become embedded through rehearsal, dialogue, and entrustment. Without deluded presupposition of being for everyone, Cheng’s practice is invested in questions around publics and accessibility.

In 2020, he reconstituted past performance texts into a murder mystery about a street busker, and continues his foray into written genre with Confidences / Baseline. Past presentations of his texts have occurred at Volksbühne (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Nacionalinė dailės galerija (Vilnius), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

The title of publication series ‘Agathe Bauer’ stands for a broadly misheard hook “I’ve got the power” from a German 1990 Eurodance hit ‘The Power’ by the band Snap! The hook that turned the song into a hit, came from Jocelyn Brown’s track ‘Love's Gonna Get You’, but neither her name nor the track appears in the credits. And, here is where Agathe Bauer comes in - a mysterious being who acquires agency through the homophonic misinterpretation of the main hook “I’ve got the power”.

In ‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ Agathe has an agenda. Nothing could be as it would have been, but she is here to trace the sources of how it has become. Agathe Bauer is here to analyze the capacity of misinterpretation to unveil asymmetric power structures in knowledge systems and by tuning into the social-political, cultural and aesthetic dimension of it.

‘Issue Zero: Picking Up Promises’ features contributions by: Gabriela Acha, [{“CIBELLE”(CAVALLI}BASTOS)], Lynn Hershman Leeson, Romy Kießling, Markues, Luzie Meyer, Maru Mushtrieva, Claudia Pagès, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Miriam Stoney, Christine Sun Kim, Eric Winkler, Miriam Yammad, Anna Zett.

Conceptualized and edited by Gabriela Acha, Romy Kießling, Maru Mushtrieva.
Designed by Timur Akhmetov.