Ce Que Laurence Rassel Nous Fait Faire

The work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is considered today an invaluable testimony on the deportation and the holocaust of the Romani people during the Second World War. For the very first time, this publication considers equal to her graphic work the notes she wrote on the back of her drawings and paintings. Stojka's particular use of language, phonetically adapted from her knowledge of German, is here transcribed and translated into English, while giving access to both sides of her works.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2021.

Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Austria to a family of Romani horse traders, the Lovaras. She was still a child when the nazi racial laws drove her into the hell of the concentration camps for 24 months. As a survivor, she covered up this trauma with a heavy silence for almost 40 years. In the 1980s, facing other tragic circumstances in her life, the denial of the Romani holocaust and the resurgence of extreme right-wing racist ideas in Austria, she felt an urgent need to testify. She wrote at first, then started to draw and eventually found her way by blending the two as a self-taught artist. She calls upon us, through her visions of childhood, to never turn a blind eye on what happened, and to remain vigilant as to what may emerge again. Ceija Stojka died in 2013 in Vienna.

Edited by François Piron.
Texts by Ceija Stojka, Noëlig Le Roux, Irka Cederberg.
Graphic design: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

The theme was built around the idiom “VOSTOK”, the title given by Stéphanie Pécourt to her cycle dedicated to performative semantics, in which carte-blanches signed by guest curators at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles are deployed. Buried beneath several kilometers of ice, Lake Vostok acts as an invitation that both fascinates and refuses us. This sub-glacial lake on the edge of Antarctica, the largest identified, becomes the mirror-object of our desires and fears for the abyssal depths. The title of the program, Now I am a Lake, is taken from Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror (1961).

This booklet includes the scripts and texts of the performances, translated exclusively into French for the occasion, as well as images from the videos presented at the eponymous event. The compilation focuses on Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror, and includes an introductory text by curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. 

edited by SB34
graphic design by Raphaëlle Serres / Solid Éditons

Contributions by Signe Frederiksen, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Margaux Schwarz, Hagar Tenenbaum, Sylvia Plath & Eleanor Ivory Weber

Great is the Power of the Name considers the works of authors Elena Ferrante, Pauline Reáge, Karl Ove Knausgård, Colette and artist Lee Lozano. 

In 2016, when Anne-Mette had invited Signe to take on the role as editor of her text The Institute of Applied Speech, they both began reading Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Novels. They were specifically fascinated by the author’s use of pseudonym. Anne-Mette's Institute of Applied Speech was a tale of a fictive place, a pseudo-topos, and Elena Ferrante’s ideas about the pseudonym as a space for the writing itself was useful in thinking about fictive authorship. In a number of written interviews, Elena Ferrante unfolds the feminist perspective of her use of pseudonym. They were attracted by the idea that the author could avoid the biographical question; that she could disappear behind her own writing. 

To them, the artist Lee Lozano is the ghostly presence of hard-core moralist and humorous fuck-off art from another decade. During the course of her life, Lozano continuously reconfigured and gradually dissolved her own name, starting from Leonore Knaster ending up with E. Her work Boycott Women, in which she decides not to have any contact with women, expands the notion of feminist critique. 

Great is the Power of the Name publishes a readership interested in the position of the artist, and how it conditions the way we make art.

Feminist Fatwas traces how Muslim feminists are resisting misogynistic interpretations of the Quran (like the verse male clerics have used to condone wife-beating). 

For centuries, the translators and interpreters of the Holy Quran have been men. This is changing now as more and more Muslim feminists cast their eye on the patriarchal contexts of these interpretations. Feminist Fatwas tells the story of  Verse 34 in Chapter 4 which has been interpreted by male clerics as condoning a husband beating his wife. This essay traces the groundbreaking work of knocking down this misogynist Quranic interpretations. The story of how Muslim feminists are doing this work is a chronicle of the slow and quiet feminist revolution taking place within Islam as women take on significant and powerful roles. 

Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color

After diagnosis, the fact was that Austin Gross lived in his home country. He sat on the porch squinting like a potato and it was a comforting thing to imagine: rock-climbing with a blindfold. ‘Can swim, eyes open,’ he jotted and covered his eyes again. Sun, centrifuge, prognosis, bird-listening. The collision shaped genres like tectonic ripples. Windows open, a story while forgetting. ‘I am a memory eater.’
Aras was furloughed from prison that summer. Five years before, she’d missed their movie plan, and the fact was that since then, she lived in her home country. Furlough, Aras wrote, was ‘no-time.’ They investigated the situation together.

Austin Gross is an essayist and collaborator in elliptical orbit. His home discipline is philosophy and language English, on one condition: having left home. Trans-disciplinarity gives us a chance to be hosts and guests.

For so it happens that when the poets speak, objects appear closer to their own shadows. The poet's mouth fills up with horses and marble, and his verses start to shine like rivers. These rivers then turn back to flow through the very palace he is depicting. The poet's own words begin to weigh down on him, as though he were holding up a palace with his palms. Then he travels, and the palace is obliterated. Countries and nations change, and naught remains but what the poets had seen. Of what the poets had seen, naught remains but its image in anthologies. And when the libraries have been flooded or burned to the ground, nothing but the commentaries on those anthologies are left, and all that one finds in these commentaries is that which was appropriated and wrought a thousand times over. 

Hussein Nassereddine is a multidisciplinary artist. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments - some verbal, some sonic, some tactile - rooted in collective histories and resources of poetry, ruins, construction and image-making.

Translated from Arabic by Ben Koerber.

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.