Books

day pulls down the sky is the title of Okpokwasili’s first (and simultaneously released) LP initiated by Danspace Project’s executive director and chief curator Judy Hussie-Taylor who brought the idea of a recording to Okwui during one of their meetings about Danspace’s Platform 2020 and research institute. These songs were written by Okwui between 2012 and 2018, some specifically for her interdisciplinary performances. Four of the songs were first performed by Okwui at Danspace Project, including “sam’s song” on the occasion of Sam Miller’s memorial on September 15, 2018.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.

Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

Written in the style of a sarcastic and irreverent guidebook, How to Suppress Women's Writing explains how women are prevented from producing written works, not given credit when such works are produced, or dismissed or belittled for those contributions they are acknowledged to have made. Although primarily focusing on texts written in English, the author also includes examples from non-English works and other media, like paintings. Citing authors and critics like Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Cavendish, and Vonda McIntyre, Russ aims to describe the systematic social forces that impede widespread recognition of the work of female authors.

Life not as singular and individual, but entangled and connected. 

Featuring a poem by Hanne Lippard, an interview with Dope St Jude, 6 Q&A's with IG Meme LGBTQ+ accounts, Selected Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory’s ‘Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects’ by Chris E. Vargas, an interview with Marilyn Waring, BUTCHCAMP, an essay Nina Lykke, (radical) self-care: biography of a network, a fashion shoot 'Gluck, Hig, Tim, Grub, Peter' photographed by Ilenia Arosio, an essay by Nadia Hebson, WICKED TECHNOLOGY/WILD FERMENTATION by Sara Manente, a Second Skin Harness by Sara Manente, Inju Kaboom and Gunbike Erdemir, Feminism, He-Yin Zhen and Reconceptualizing China’s History: A Brief Comment by Rebecca E. Karl, Thunderclap by Amy Suo Wu, an interview with Amy Sillman by Melissa Gordon, Some Women Want to Have Their Cock and Eat It To by Jill Johnston, (Post)Menopausal Graphic Design Strategies by Rietlanden Women’s Office and the essay Sex in Texas, anticipated by Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

By means of a dialogue between the text and the visual material from the videos, Steyn Bergs and Emma van der Put want to take a critical look at how images are mobilised, not only to illustrate certain visions of the future, but also how they contribute to the creation of such visions—which are never ‘neutral’—in the present. On the basis of the videos made by Van der Put, this publication focuses on the specific working and politics of images in the Noordwijk and the Expo area in Brussels. Within these locations, developments that are currently taking place throughout Europe (from property speculation to migration flows) manifest themselves in a concrete and local manner.

With contributions by: Rebecca Jagoe, Erin Eck, Skye Arundhati Thomas, Samuel Kenswil, Daniella Valz-Gen, Alex Margo Arden, Artun Alaska Arasli, Stacy Skolnik, Laura Morrison, Benjamin Edwin Slinger, Harman Bains and Audry B.

With contributions by: Georgia Patience Anderson, Hans-Christian Dany, Ruth Angel Edwards, Liv Fontaine, Sarah Gail, Adam Gallagher, Penny Goring, Harmony Grunge, Tiziana La Melia, Aaron Lehman and Thomas Laprade, James Loop, Rosanna McNamara.

The Interjection Calendar is an on and offline project, devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. The PDF can be downloaded for free and there are 12 releases per year. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. 

Contributors: Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. She currently works as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery (Sheffield) and is the founder and curator of TMT Projects - a contemporary arts platform based in Luton Town. 

vei darling is a first generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist and activist, who grew up in the D(M)V. vei moved to New York City when she was 17, and began an intense path of spiritual reconfiguration. vei positions herself within social justice and humanitarianism, whilst being infused with magick and spirituality. Her ultimate desire is to subvert the current paradigm in lieu of one that respects and reflects life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Caspar Heinemann is a writer, artist and poet. Their interests include critical occultism, gay biosemiotics and countercultural mythologies. Some of the time they teach and read things at institutions, a lot of the time they cook potatoes in different shapes and listen to Alan Watts lectures. They were born in London, UK, roughly 2.5 months after the release of Green Day’s seminal album Dookie. 

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). He studied at Howard University, Cave Canem, and California Institute of the Arts. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family just west of Minneapolis and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Douglaskearney.com 

Cara Levine - with: Khadija Tarver, Christine Wong Yap, Eliza Myrie, Greg Boyle, Rodney Lu- cas, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ashley Stull Meyers, Sidony O’neal, Kambui Olujimi Jadelynn Stahl, Amanda Eicher, Jessica Angima, Faye Gleisser, Quenton Baker, Sam Aranke, Jade Thacker, Ekaette Ekong, Christopher Johnson, Marvin K White, Kemi Adeyemi, Constance Hockaday, Kate Johnson, Bayete Ross-Smith, Leila Weefur, Kirat Randhawa, Angela Hennessy, Elizabeth Dorbad, Prophet Walker, Shamell Bell, Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Ann Lewis. Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA and is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. 

Daisy Parris was born in Kent, 1993, and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014. She currently lives and works in South London. Daisy Parris’ work raises questions about identity politics as well as the limits of what it means to be human. By using various formats such as portraiture, roomscapes and text, Parris focuses on identity struggles as well as the worry, guilt, numbness and the violent encounters of everyday existence. 

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xeno-femme sci /fantasy, cursed video games, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. 

James Lawrence Slattery is an artist, critic and academic living and working in London. They hold an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a masters in Film Aesthetics from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 

Gjergji Shkurti is a New York based author. His writing explores architecture as fiction and incorporates a filmic imagination. The writing stems from a yearning to push history forward. 

Chanel Vegas is an artist who works in London. She writes poetry, makes paintings, and regularly performs as part of her work. Chanel graduated from Goldsmiths in 2017 and was the first student to be the recipient of the university’s Artist Award. 

Punch Viratmalee currently lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Viratmalee graduated Chulalongkorn University in 2015 with a BA in Communication Design. She previously worked at a commercial gallery in Bangkok and is now working as a curatorial assistant for the first Thailand Biennale. She also writes. 

The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente under which they write criticism an occasionally curate. The White Pube is based at thewhitepube. com and on Twitter and Instagram as @thewhitepube.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

"Gender as a concept is not only applicable to humans. When the idea of gender is applied to the cables, its meaning is reduced into a relationship of insertion. As a non-binary individual and designer, I find this problematic that such way of classifying gender violently erases the existence of everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories. However, instead of insisting on abolishing those terms, I discovered that the idea of gender that we applied to the electric cables functioning in very queer ways that we couldn’t expect." More on www.d-act.org.

The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass during the Block I /2014 curated by Lilia Mestre. Questions on art, dreams, politics, violence, research, life, practice, bureaucracy, resistance, etcetera, … are addressed and later on re-addressed, revisited and assembled into a book with (at least) three faces… 

BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book. 

The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris ... This is the legend of a she-dandy's life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.

'As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.' - Anne Boyer

Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological movements: all look at the body as a ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a signifier for the reproduction crisis generated by the neoliberal turn in capitalist development and for the international surge in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and bestselling author Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body into a work-machine, expanding on one of the main subjects of her first book, Caliban and the Witch. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens. 

With an afterword by Chris Kraus.

Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color. - Chandra Talpade Mohanty

This substantial archive offers an ideal point of entry into the work and reception of Los Angeles–based performance artist and writer Andrea Fraser (born 1965). The interview format provides particular insight into Fraser's self-positioning as a central aspect of her practice. By presenting the artist's voice as mediated through various interlocutors (ranging from professional peers to popular media), Collected Interviews, 1990–2018 uniquely contextualizes Fraser's practice in the artistic and institutional fields in which she intervenes.

Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community.

In the late 1960s, Lee Lozano conceived of and executed a series of 'language pieces,' written in the pages of her notebooks, consisting of rules and parameters for the actions that would constitute a piece. From offering money to house-guests to smoking as much marijuana as possible, Lozano boldly tested social norms, culminating in two of her most famous works: 'General Strike Piece' (1969), which saw her retreating from the art world completely, and 'Decide to Boycott Women' (1971), in which she ceased engaging with all members of her own gender.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. 

of sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear. 

While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.

"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible. Originally published as a series of home-made pamphlets that seemed to come as much from post-punk zine culture as from avant-garde poetics, it's good to see them gathered here in one place for the first time and as a body of evidence of a culture of struggle. These poems do not merely comment on that struggle, but emerge from within it. They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity." – Sean Bonney

Born in Flames – the publication – is the complete authorised graphic translation of Lizzie Borden’s mythical 1983 film Born in Flames. Kaisa Lassinaro’s post-facto screenplay captures all the political energy and visual brilliance of Borden’s film, which describes a futuristic society (eerily similar to our own) where the achievements of a past revolution are threatened by reactionary sexist forces. 

The published version of Born in Flames allows for a frame-by-frame analysis of the film’s complex plot and soundtrack, with songs by The Bloods and Red Crayola. Included is an interview with Borden conducted by Lassinaro, in which the filmmaker looks back on the making of her film.

For '​A Studio in Hand-Reading: Charlotte Wolff'​ Valentina Desideri transformed Kunstverein’s space into a Studio – a place that generates knowledge through different modes of being together. Throughout the exhibition, Desideri invited participants as well as visitors to gather for readings and in study.

The Studio – and its bar – were open for readings during Kunstverein’s regular opening hours and punctuated by weekly contributions to the study by the invited guests and artists. 'Handreading Studies​' picks up where the project left off, bringing together a variety of materials and publications that were generated in or reverberated from the Studio.