Books

Movement Research announces Issue 54 of its publication, the Movement Research Performance Journal. Continuing to experiment with approaches that engage contemporary choreography and performance through the medium of print—poem, prose, image, interview and a wide range of formats give form to critical and self-reflexive discourses and material histories. Movement Research Performance Journal acts as a site of convergence between publication, editors, writers, designers, and artists to consider the place of dance, performance, and choreography in relation to the contemporary moment.

For MRPJ54: Spatial Practice, guest editor, artist Alan Ruiz invited contributors to examine the ongoing legacy of neoliberalism and the cultural production it engenders, specifically focusing on the relation between bodies and the built environment. Contributors have explored the contexts and histories in which we dwell, create, and coexist to interrogate how space is produced both as material and ideology during the hyper-development and hyper-exploitation of the urban environment, predominantly in New York City. Spatial Practice asks: how does this impact the bodies that labor and move to keep the kinetic machine of “progress” moving? Contributions offer multiple perspectives—through a variety of genres—on the ways in which the political project of neoliberalism has, in part, shaped the designation and use of public space as well as enthroned the philanthropic class and the cultural institutions associated with them. Alongside the consolidation of wealth and power, neoliberalism’s underlying insistence on individualism has also reinforced and normalized the braided conditions of capitalist exploitation, structural racism, and patriarchal domination. Unraveling this logic allows us to collectively imagine alternatives to the prevailing systems of property, dispossession, ableism, and incarceration that parcelize existence.

Contributions from:

Critical Resistance, Alan Ruiz, Lluís Alexandre, Casanovas Blanco, Julie Tolentino and Sadia Shirazi, Kaegan Sparks, Martha Rosler, Suzanne Stephens, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Lo-Yi Chan and Tim Hartung, Olive McKeon, Alice Sheppard, Biba Bell, Erik Thurmond, BRANDT : HAFERD, V. Mitch McEwen and Olivier Tarpaga, Sarah Oppenheimer, Jimmy Robert and Mario Gooden, Dominic Cullinan, Angela Davis J. Bouey and Melanie Greene, Lisa Nelson, Diana Crum, Kristopher, K.Q. Pourzal, Jess Barbagallo, John Hoobyar and Simon Asencio, Layla Zami, Cristiane Bouger, Daria Faïn and Marjana Krajač, Germaine Acogny, Helmut Vogt and André Zachery, Milka Djordevich and Tim Reid, Melanie Maar.

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which the wild, a space located beyond normative borders of sexuality, offers sources of opposition to knowing and being that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern subject.

"WILD THINGS is queer theorist Jack Halberstam's account of sexuality in general, and queerness in particular, after nature. As the heterosexual/homosexual binary emerged in the late 19th-century and coalesced in the 20th-century, discourses of both heterosexuality and homosexuality defined sexuality in relation to nature and the natural world. The most well-known is the homophobic framing of homosexuality as unnatural, aberrant, and "against" nature, but of equal importance is the 19th-century male dandy's positioning of artifice and camp-and through it homosexuality-as anti-natural. On the other hand, heterosexuality was often held up as the "natural" sexuality and, later in the 20th-century, gay scientists tried to prove that homosexuality was a natural, biological desire.

In this book, Halberstam mobilizes wildness as an analytic through which an alternative history of sexuality and desire outside of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and taxonomical classifications can emerge. To that end, Halberstam turns back to the orderly, taxonomical, and classified homosexuality and heterosexuality of the 19th and 20th-centuries and asks: what embodiments and desires were swept under the carpet in the process of creating identitarian sexualities?

Halberstam claims these excluded and unruly figures as "wild" lives lived out in embodiments and desires which eluded the orderly classifications of their era. Wildness, for Halberstam, thus becomes a way to claim an "epistemology of the ferox," a way of being and knowing in the world which is not the opposition of order but order's absence: a force which "disorders desire and desires disorder."

Although he is clear that wildness and queerness are not interchangeable, Halberstam sees in wildness and "wild thought" queer theory's anti-identitarian impulse to explore life outside of the limits of the human and liberal governance. More than just a project of recuperating queer figures lost in the archive, Halberstam's WILD THINGS argues for a revision of queer history, one in which "nature" and the "natural world" does not function as that which sexuality defines itself with and against"

Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.

"In DUB Alexis Pauline Gumbs continues with the third book in her poetry series, the first two books being Spill, inspired by Hortense Spillers, and M Archive, inspired by Jacqui Alexander. Whereas Spill deals with the contemporary afterlives of slavery and M Archive describes the post-dated evidence of our imminent apocalypse, DUB destroys Gumbs' own origin story, as she questions the assumptions and histories she has held onto most of her life. This text, through engagement with Sylvia Wynter's rigor, reinvents language outside of personal histories.

DUB is organized into topical sections, where spacious prose poems animate the voice of an underwater chorus in ceremonies that flow into one another. Beginning a daily writing practice, Gumbs wrote DUB based on moments of emphasis in Sylvia Wynter's essays (and one interview over several decades).

This book is influenced by the promiscuity and prolificity of dub music, the confrontational home-grown intimacy of dub poetry, and the descendants of this work. Dub uses the impact of repetition and the incantatory power of the spoken broken word. Gumbs uses dub to emphasize that Sylvia Wynter learned every colonial language and came to the conclusion that the ways of thinking that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time and heretical to the ways of thinking that came before them; and so it must be possible to construct ways to understand life and place differently now as well.

Gumbs goes back to the origin stories that precede her and turns the blood into paint, emphasizing that "then" is also "now" through the broken and intense voices of ancestors. Inspired by Wynter's heretical poetic action against our deepest beliefs, DUB is an artifact and tool for breath retraining and interspecies ancestral listening.

Throughout the text, listening includes speakers who have never been considered human: whales and algae. Gumbs is attentive to kindred beyond taxonomy, questioning kinship loyalty, and suggests that our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes, a story that can be changed. This book will be of interest to scholars of African-American studies, diaspora studies, feminism, queer theory, English, creative writing and poetry"

Text by Eleanor Ivory Weber
Published by Forlaget emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten
Edited and produced by Eller med a △ Åbäke 
Edition: 200 ex. 
Format (b*h): 20 * 26,5 cm
Pages: 48 sider 
Print: Grafiche Veneziane
Paper: Munken Pure 170g
Typeface: Base12 by Zuzana Licko

More info at https://www.cecilieskov.com/Works/Wet-With-Dew

A novel that describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends.

The novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As Edmund White observed, "[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his predicament." In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Hervé Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.

Translated from French by Linda Coverdale
Introduction by Andrew Durbin
Afterword by Edmund White

Published May 2020 

Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.

Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French autofiction of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers.

Edited and Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Published May 2020

In Neves Marques’ book, polyamorous encounters and the intimacy of queer lives run parallel to the history of modern science.

Pedro Neves Marques's first poetry collection includes two sets of poems written between 2017 and 2019 and spans the author's biographical geographies, from Brazil and Lisbon to London and New York. From precise geometries to tragicomic gestures and long free verse confessions, Neves Marques’s poetry moves with great honesty between deep social analyses to the tactile quality of remembrance. Whether in a long and devoted poem tying together friendship and historical legacies across the Atlantic in “Brazil” or in the condensed and timed recollections of “Thirteen Days in Lisbon,” the poems collected in "Sex as Care" acknowledge the reality of both care and violence in intimacy. For their part, "Other Viral Poems" takes a more programmatic approach, drawing an analogy between the spread of the Zika epidemic in Brazil, the genetic modification of its carrier mosquito, and the rise of fascism to mount a critique of both gender biases in science and anti-queer populisms. In orderly fashion, the poems coopt a militaristic and technical language to instead create spaces of intimacy where gender, love, trust, and unequal experiences are tested. 

Pedro Neves Marques is a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. Born in Lisbon, they have lived in London, São Paulo, and New York. They have read at e-flux, Poetry Project, The Vera List Center, McNally Jackson Bookstore, Nottingham Contemporary, Gasworks, and Sesc São Paulo, among many others. They have also published two short-story collections, most recently in Portuguese "Morrer na América” (Kunsthalle Lissabon/ Arranha-Céus) as well as in publications by e-flux journal, The Baffler, Verso, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and MIT Press. 

In I saw the world collapse and it was only a word, published on the occasion of his concert in December 2019 at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hassan Khan articulates the communal yet individualized feelings of sadness and trouble before they coalesce into larger structures and institutions through a libretto for five vocalists, showing us the fleeting moments of the world as it is collapsing rather than only the dust of its collapse. The work is characterized by layered fragments that gesture toward a tonality and unity that nearly coalesce, but that dissipate as soon as they emerge. The collapsing word could be anything: the death of a family member; a defeated revolution; a heartbreak. It means something different from one place, one individual, to the next while still existing so broadly that it defines a more communal experience felt across the globe. A collapse from what? Rather than a doomsday message, it intimates that perhaps the world isn't really collapsing at all. Instead, Khan poses collapse as an ever-present underlying condition, challenging much contemporary intellectualizing that positions the current moment as somehow peculiar or extraordinary. 

"1) Blame your partner for every disaster that has even occurred: G. 
2) Oscillate in confusion between these two pitches using a glissando to come and go at a narcotic speed: A♭ C♭. 
3) Argue with your best friend while looking at them using this progression: G – B – D – E♯. 
4) Demand an apology using the progression: E – C – A♭♭ – F. 
5) Beg for forgiveness by using the two highest pitches you can reach. 
6) Ask a question by humming this progression: E♭♭ – D♭ – Ax – A♯. 
7) Lose interest in everything using this progression: F – A – C – C♯."

Hassan Khan (born 1975 in London, lives and works in Cairo) works with image, sound, text, space and situation.

Who claims love?

The benign and seemingly innocent heart symbol hides a much more complex story than its surface suggests. The heart is often described as a universal symbol for love, yet its history suggests otherwise; it is closer to a corporate and political medium, embedded with contemporary imbalances of class, gender, and race.

This book wishes to reveal the intricacies and problematics surrounding the heart symbol and explores how technological, political and historical dominance has impacted the development of communication and our access to (online) information today.

Six years in the making, 'BLOOD' is the first comprehensive English translation of the poems of Danish art historian, communist activist, and writer R. Broby-Johansen.

Translated, edited, and designed by Line-Gry Hørup, Broby-Johansen’s poems are accompanied by a series of full colour photographs by Amsterdam photographer Johannes Schwartz, which document the pair’s trip to Brody-Johansen’s recently established archive. So recent, that they were in fact the first to view it. 'BLOOD' was made possible with the support of Stimuleringsfonds and the Danish Arts Foundation.

A notebook based on Ursula Biemann's latest film, Acoustic Ocean, an expedition to the depths of the Arctic Ocean in search of interspecies communications.

32 p, ills colour, 14 x 23 cm, pb, French/English

This is Spanish artist Dora García’s collaborative research on the life and legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), a socialist, activist, feminist, and intellectual. As a Soviet ambassador from 1922 to 1945, she advocated the sexual and social emancipation of women, and implemented many measures women continue to fight for today, such as legalising abortion and protecting women’s rights. Her writings found special resonance in Latin America, where her influence is still felt in contemporary feminist struggles.

The essays “On the Dragon” and “White Bird” are translated into English here for the first time, and are published alongside a selection of poems by Anna Akhmatova.

'Licorice' is a novel, a mixed-up tale about a film, a windmill and city folk. The plot involves the making of a film by characters who are trying to gain permission to record the noises inside a reconstructed windmill to use as its soundtrack. When they don't succeed, the eponymous character Licorice makes an Aeolian harp out of bits she finds in a small electricals recycling bin. Licorice is the first title in the forthcoming Interstices series of books guest edited by Brighton based author Bridget Penney, whose previous publications include Honeymoon with Death and Other Stories (Polygon, 1991) and Index (Book Works, 2008).

144 p, ills colour & bw, 11 x 18 cm, pb, English

An expansive anthology focused on concrete poetry written by women in the groundbreaking movement’s early history. It features 50 writers and artists from Europe, Japan, Latin America, and the United States selected by editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre.

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 takes as its point of departure Materializzazione del linguaggio—the groundbreaking exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women curated by Italian feminist artist Mirella Bentivoglio for the Venice Biennale in 1978. Through this exhibition and others she curated, Bentivoglio traced constellations of women artists working at the intersection of the verbal and visual who sought to “reactivate the atrophied tools of communication” and liberate words from the conventions of genre, gender, and the strictures of the patriarchy and normative syntax.

The works in this volume evolved from previous manifestations of concrete poetry as defined in foundational manifestos by Öyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and the Brazilian Noigandres Group. While some works are easily recognized as concrete poetry, as documented in canonical anthologies edited by Mary Ellen Solt and Emmett Williams in the late ’60s, it also features expansive, serial works that are overtly feminist and often trouble legibility. Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 revisits the figures in Bentivoglio’s orbit and includes works by women practicing in other milieus in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America who were similarly concerned with activating the visual and sonic properties of language and experimenting with poetry’s spatial syntax.

Artists and writers include Lenora de Barros, Ana Bella Geiger, and Mira Schendel from Brazil; Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Liliana Landi, Anna Oberto, and Giovanna Sandri from Italy; Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay; Suzanne Bernard and Ilse Garnier from France; Blanca Calparsoro from Spain; Paula Claire and Jennifer Pike from the UK; Betty Danon from Turkey; Mirtha Dermisache from Argentina; Bohumila Grögerová from the Czech Republic; Ana Hatherly and Salette Tavares from Portugal; Madeline Gins, Mary Ellen Solt, Susan Howe, Liliane Lijn, and Rosmarie Waldrop from the US; Irma Blank and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt from Germany; Chima Sunada from Japan; and Katalin Ladik and Bogdanka Poznanović from the former Yugoslavia.

Forty-five years ago movements of liberation made possible the birth of a new project in the world, the Lesbian Herstory Archives. In Sinister Wisdom 118 are some of the founding stories, telling what it meant to walk first into an apartment and later into a four-story limestone building, where shame became history, secrets became shared connections and complex lesbian, queer histories were enriched by maintaining intergenerational community.

A grassroots collection, the Archives was intentional about engaging with all facets and complexities of lesbian life, inclusive of diversity in race and gender-identity, from the bar life of the fifties and before, to the lesbian-feminist cultural richness of the mid-twentieth century and beynd, to the gender richness of the tweny-first. This issue honors an Archives that articulates the complexities of how lesbians make our way in the world.

Homophone Dictionary was originally a file that is compiled by the now 96-year-old former schoolteacher Susan Nixon. She has build up many collections throughout her life, almost all of them exist out of objects, except one: after her retirement she compiled a word document that by now exist out of almost 1000 homophones; two, or more words that you pronounce similar but have a different meaning, often the spelling is also different.

The document is structured as a dictionary and the homophones are illustrated with examples that are based on autobiographical information. The structure of Homophone Dictionary also refers to speech therapy exercises and concrete poetry.

“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’

I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”

Offset print
20,4 × 12,4 cm
edition of 500

A short text or a long line written by Mette Edvardsen for Etcetera magazine (June 2018) on an invitation to elaborate on her approach to text, writing and speech from a choreographic point of view. Held by a cardboard cover, the text is here published on its own as a very slim book.

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Bringing together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities, Le Chauffage intends to spark discussions and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

David Wojnarowicz's In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published as a photocopied zine/artist's book to accompany an exhibition of the same name at PPOW Gallery in 1989. Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status, and for good reason.

In it we find, for the first time, Wojnarowicz's writing and visual art, two mediums for which he is renowned, playing off each other in equal measure. We glimpse the artist's now iconic mixed-media works, with motifs of ants, locomotives, money, tornados and dinosaurs, juxtaposed with journal-like texts or "notes towards a frame of reference" that examine historical and global mechanisms of power symbolized through the technology of their times.
Wojnarowicz uses the fractured experience of his day-to-day life (including dreams, which he recorded fastidiously) to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural and racial oppression. The artist's experience living with HIV is a constant subject of the work, used to shed light on the political and social mechanisms perpetuating discrimination against not only himself, but against women and people of color, who faced additional barriers in their efforts to receive treatment for the illness. Rooted in the maelstrom of art, politics, religion and civil rights of the 1980s, the book provides a startling glimpse into an American culture that we have not yet left behind. Félix Guattari provides an introduction.

Painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter and activist, David Wojnarowicz was born in Redbank, New Jersey, in 1954 and died of AIDS in New York in 1992. The author of five books—most famously Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration—Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship.

THE AGAINST NATURE JOURNAL is a biannual arts and human rights magazine exploring “crime against nature” laws and their legacies, in print, in person, and online. Authors and readers from law, activism, social sciences, and the arts are brought together to foster dialogue on sexual and reproductive rights and rethink nature anew.

Émilie Notéris focuses her analysis on artworks created by women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a book that is at once literary, aesthetic and political.

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Paraguay creates a collection of essays and book-length interviews, published in, or translated into French. The books in this series are commissioned ones, books developed independently and freely, without a deadline. They articulate thoughts on art and political positions in the present through situated and experimental literary writing.

Émilie Notéris (born 1978) is an essayist, science fiction author, and translator.

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.