Books

The seventh issue holds longer stories alongside the poems we’ve always so dearly loved. there’s less fantasy than in previous issues and more direct observations of the times we’re living in today; at times fearful, at times angry, at times joyful and warm. we might be predisposed to the slightly woowoo, but it does seem somewhat like a miraculously-timed message to us - this issue reminds us not to turn away from the things that are hard to face but to be uplifted by noticing the wonder around us, sharing both with community wherever we can.

The eighth issue of Errant Journal questions the ways in which hegemonic culture and discourse tends to prioritize the ideal of openness, access, transparency, and visibility. Delving into topics such as face coverings, ‘coming out’ in queer discourses, the use of opacity in transformative justice, and different strategies of (visual) resistance, ‘Against Visibility’ can be read as a proposition of refusal of the paradigm of visibility and access that permeates all areas of western thinking. At a moment in which representation and uncovering ‘lost’ histories are trending, Errant asks what is being erased in a world where everything must always be visible. When Édouard Glissant proclaimed the right to opacity, he sought not to be reduced or to be measured against an ideal scale in order to be understood and accepted. Expanding from this, Against Visibility looks into the ways in which unlearning imperialism also includes unlearning the ideal of visibility itself.

Contributors: Vivi Alfonsín, Leila Ben Abdallah, Mariam Ben Slama, Michèle Boulogne, Irene de Craen, AmaraChíkà Emele-Ralph, Cosmo M. Esposito, Jamie McGhee, Ludovica Micalizzi, Nadine Monem, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Musa Shadeedi, Federica Stagni

Slow Reading Club (SRC) is a semi-fictional reading group initiated and run by Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen. Since 2016, in numerous contexts, they have rehearsed alternatives to the kinds of reading they were taught in school, actively suppressing semantic content through strobe lights, strange postures, sociality, and toxins. Operating at the contact zones between reader and text, text and text, reader and reader, they attempt to build a practice from within the unstable space of reading itself.

Répondeur is an extensive account of SRC’s practice in collective reading sessions, exhibitions, and textual bootlegging. Imagined as a scroll, with a rhyme structure and typesetting by Will Holder, the book brings together facsimiles of SRC readers, a wide-ranging interview by Alicja Melzacka, new texts by Joyelle McSweeney and Bill Dietz, and visual work and translations by SRC. These discrete elements are interwoven into a complex, shimmering whole, delighting in the ruptures and elisions of one text’s move into the next.

East Pakistan, 1971. On their way to visit their mother, two sisters, Lucky and Jamila, are captured by Pakistani soldiers and thrown into a world of horror.

Locked in a room in an unknown village-turned-camp by the river, the women look through a lone barred window onto white jasmines blooming day and night. Meanwhile, around the camp, deadly guerrilla fighters from the Bengali Mukti Bahini gather to take back territory from the Pakistan Army.

As Bangladesh crowns painfully into the world, Lucky and Jamila must choose between heartbreak and secrecy to return from an unspoken violence.

Saima Begum is a British-Bangladeshi writer based in North London. She won the MFest Short Story Competition in 2021. The First Jasmines is her first novel.

How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these questions by looking at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante. A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it lovingly delineates a small group that withdraws from the rhythms of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante’s most riveting moments, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a supple and mobile collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence.

Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, Deroo’s Barge Life reconsiders an important forerunner to the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the intimately cramped living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.

Taking the shape of an accordion-folded A3 poster, “Under The Sea” investigates the political economy of global internet infrastructures, whose material reality has temporarily become visible during fibre optic network expansion works in The Hague and other Dutch cities.

As internet users, we spend a lot of time underwater. Contrary to popular belief, satellites play a negligible role in beaming our intimate messages, cat footage and work emails across the globe.

99% of all intercontinental internet traffic travels through one of over 550 fibre optic cables criss-crossing our oceans. Despite its scale, complexity and many interlinkages with global systems of power, this network of cables and landing points commonly remains invisible.

Printing: Risograph, Stencilwerck Den Haag; English text and Photography: Livio Liechti; Dutch translation: Minke Havelaar; Design: Apsara Flury. 
Edition of 250. Co-funded by Oxfam Novib.

As our streets become ever more securitised and visually sanitised, and as most forms of everyday communications are shifting to the digital realm, homemade missing posters are one of the few remaining forms of paper-based citizen expression still found in public spaces.

Drawing on a collection of several hundred missing animal posters collected over the last 10 years, “MISSING” brings seemingly isolated text fragments into conversation to weave a narrative of loss and hope. 

Featuring exaggerated duotone images, the publication explores the link between the weathering of physical posters and the fading away of cherished memories. While looking through these visual artefacts, one is left to wonder how many of these animals have been reunited with their families. 

Printing: Risograph, Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag; Photography and colour separations: Livio Liechti; Design: Apsara Flury. 
First print run (Blue) – Dec 2024: 40 copies.
Second print run (Teal) – May 2025: 50 copies.

Infrastructural systems define our ways of seeing and responding to the world around us. Today, our everyday lives and visual cultures have become saturated by digital communications systems whose physical footprint has been rendered largely invisible from the public sphere.

In an age of ever-expanding computation and a foolish believe in AI’s utopian potential, resistance can seem futile. But if we detach our gaze from increasingly narrow realm of digital imaginaries, a new world of radically different infrastructural opportunities opens up in front of our eyes.

Street libraries, or Minibiebs, as they are called in Dutch, are an under-appreciated piece of urban technology. Part manifesto, part research note, this mini publication dives into the radical potential of public book sharing structures and what they might tell us about our broken information ecosystem. 

Printing: Risograph, Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag; Research and Photography: Livio Liechti; Design: Apsara Flury. 
First print run – May 2025: 35 copies.

Tangents is an English-language online review platform focused on writing about the Dutch art scene-on what is happening both within the borders of the Netherlands and about Dutch-based artists presenting work beyond them. Born from a frustration with the prevalence of objectivity and imposing house styles in the majority of art writing commissioned by leading platforms, Tangents instead encourages contributors to approach criticism from within the specificities and focuses of their own writing practice. 

Tangents publishes a monthly review written by a writer from our stable of permanent contributors. This publication is the first printed compendium of recent writing, published on the occasion of Tangents' mentorship pro-gram, for which the founding editors each supported a young writer through development and to publication. The 2024/25 mentees were Mehmet Süzgün, Lou Vives and Dido W.

Le numéro 1 de la revue de cinéma Fidback éditée par le FIDMarseille, avec un retour sur la 35e édition du festival, un regard rétrospectif sur des films qui ont fait l'actualité mondiale du cinéma en 2024, une carte blanche à Clara Schulmann, et un portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste Declan Clarke par Alice Leroy.

Retour sur six films issus de la sélection officielle du FID, par des auteurs, critiques et écrivains de langues française et étrangères. Les textes critiques sont accompagnés d'entretiens, de documents ou de matériaux inédits. De Amsevrid, premier film magistral du cinéaste algérien Tahar Kessi, jusqu'au Tríptico de Mondongo du maestro argentin Mariano Llinás, ce bouquet de films est un condensé de l'édition 2024 du festival – une poignée de films parmi tous ceux qui auraient mérité le retour.

Le choix des huit films sur lesquels nous avons invité des auteurs et autrices à poser leur regard est en soi un geste critique. Il nous a semblé que les derniers films d'Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhangke et Victor Iriarte méritaient plus que d'autres l'inscription dans le temps long de la revue. Films restaurés, écrits édités, rétrospective et exposition au Jeu de Paume : Chantal Akerman fut pour beaucoup, cette année, une révélation. Naked Acts, le film ressuscité de Bridgett Davis, aura marqué ceux qui ont eu la chance de le voir.

Pour sa carte blanche, Clara Schulmann a choisi le film Lucciole (2021), de Pauline Curnier Jardin. Mais son texte porte au-delà de l'œuvre, il déplace le geste critique en un récit spéculatif sur la manière dont une vie et un travail se tissent sur une trame faite de lieux, d'histoires, de personnes.

Alice Leroy est la première à faire le portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste irlandais et berlinois Declan Clarke : à prendre la mesure, à tracer les perspectives d'une œuvre majeure, bien qu'encore méconnue, du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.

Fidback est une revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque année, elle dessine une image-constellation du cinéma aimé et défendu par le festival.

Fugue is published on the occasion of the eponymous duo exhibition by artists Aaron Amar Bhamra and Céline Mathieu, presented at Jester in Genk, Belgium. The title, derived from the Latin fuga (flight), evokes both its musical and psychological meanings: a contrapuntal compositional technique and a state of dissociation. These dual connotations—aural and mental—resonate throughout the exhibition and this accompanying publication.

Céline Mathieu's work moves between the sensory and the conceptual, integrating multiple media to explore the circulation of thoughts and materials in relation to specific sites. Aaron Amar Bhamra's practice draws on recurring forms and materials to construct evolving personal and social archives, often reactivating exhibition spaces by engaging with their historical contexts.

In addition to documenting the exhibition, the publication features an introduction by Jester's artistic director Koi Persyn, a visual score of a sound composition by Charlie Usher, written contributions by Céline Mathieu, curator Eloise Sweetman, and researcher Johanna Schindler, as well as a series of analog photographs by Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Contributions by Koi Persyn, Céline Mathieu, Charlie Usher, Eloise Sweetman, Johanna Schindler, Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Austrian artist Aaron Amar Bhamra (born 1992) often procures exhibition spaces that subtly expose their systematics and physical experience by incorporating imprints reminiscent of other spaces or past exhibitions. He occasionally uses recurring forms and materials, weaving a site of shifting personal and social archives.

Céline Mathieu (born 1989) is a Belgian artist and writer. Her practice is often site and condition specific, using sound, scent, sculpture, performance, text and different materials in performative installations. The work is both sensory and conceptual. Her work looks into the circulation of thoughts and materials. Material and economic cycles merge with hyper-personal items, resulting in fluid work that cannot quite be pinned down.

Art is slow attention. 

With Contributions from: Rosana Paulino, City Report São Paulo, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bruno Baptistelli, Françoise Schein, Anna Maria Maiolino, Rubem Valentim, Els Opsomer, Elen Braga, Julien Creuzet and Lieven De Boeck. 

Guest Editor: Jota Mombaça 

GLEAN is a Brussels-based magazine for contemporary art with quarterly publications in both English and Dutch.

Superior and Inferior presents a facsimile reprint of Italian abstract artist and feminist Carla Accardi's provocatory publication Superiore e Inferiore and the first ever English translation of the full text.

"In this book, I have bought together the transcripts of dialogues I recorded on tape in three girls' classes from the first, second and third year of a state middle school. For having proposed this unauthorised activity, I was dismissed from teaching in the light of a formal complaint". – Carla Accardi introducing her book Superiore e Inferiore, 1972.

First published in 1972 by Carla Accardi, the book Superiore e Inferiore features discussions among girls at a middle school—all between 10 and 13—about society's discriminatory behaviour towards women. They also commented the Manifesto of the revolutionary feminist group Rivolta Femminile—collectively written by Accardi, art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and Elvira Banotti—which first appeared posted on city walls in Rome in July 1970. For having discussed sex-related issues with pupils, Accardi was fired and permanently suspended from teaching. (Her letter of dismissal issued by the Italian Ministry of Education forms part of the introduction to the book.) Along the lines of Pasolini's Comizi d'Amore (Love Meetings), Accardi's own voice is secondary in the book, giving way to the thoughts, narratives, opinions, and debates expressed among girls on the role of women and girls, family conflicts and intimate relations.

Carla Accardi (1924–2014) was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informale and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She experimented with different forms of art, such as black and white painting and Sicofoil. During the late 1970s, she became part of the feminist movement with critic Carla Lonzi. Together, they founded Rivolta femminile in 1970, one of Italy's first feminist groups. Accardi's first solo exhibition in the United States was in 2001 at MoMA PS1.

Issue 01 is an A5 collection of essays, journalism, poetry, illustrations, and photography by Dyke contributors all over the world.

With contributions by Louise Dalgleish, Ráitseach (Alyssa Delahan Meade), Hex Coles, Kenoya Musa, Megan O’Driscoll, Olive Franklin, Inés Pesado Catrufo, Karla Lamb, Eva Kelly, Celina Jiménez, and others.

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

In these essays, New York psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster considers the relationship between the studio and the psychoanalyst's couch. From the scopophilic instinct of the viewer and the artist's anticipation of it to the pursuit of perfection and it's connection to the girl-child's curiosity about her mother's body, she asks us to think about art and analysis as connected practices. Focusing on Carroll Dunham and Louise Bourgeois, she argues for an embrace of our wildest symptoms in theory and in art.

This pamphlet takes as a model Jacques Lacan’s 1964 seminar in which he presented four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive.[i] In a similar manner, it reflects on some key concepts that underpin the author's clinical work as a psychoanalyst with trans-identified analysands. It argues for the re-discovery of four terms that expand Lacan’s central insights and apply to the question of trans today.

The first one is that of realness and it develops Lacan’s notion of the Real as not identical with reality; realness is often used by trans persons to describe the authenticity of their gender performance for it is a supreme truth beyond any verification.

The second concept is the concept of plasticity as developed by Catherine Malabou and applied to Schreber’s case discussed by Freud and Lacan. Plasticity leads to a conversation about beauty and its function in trans discourse.

The third concept is that of the nothing articulated with a certain type of laughter, a nothing introduced by Democritus and discussed by Barbara Cassin, Alain Badiou and Madlen Dolar. Lacan famously identified the “nothing” as one of the objects of psychoanalysis. I push the analysis to the point where one can understand a wish to “not being” (as found in suicide) as leading to the goal of “being again.” The meden was deployed by Barbara Cassin in her book Lacan the Sophist, and in discussion with Alain Badiou.

Finally, the last concept is that of the clinamen or turbulence in atomic philosophy (Lucretius) and in contemporary discourse; this turbulence throws new light on the role of accidents, and how accidents can turn into destiny (tuché). The classical concepts of the clinamen and turbulence have been explored systematically by Michel Serres. This turbulence echoes with Lacan’s notion of the sinthome as a symptom that does not need to be cured but leads to a re-creation of oneself that makes life livable.

The pamphlet offers a new twist to philosophical references the author discussed in Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017). Taken together, these four clusters of concepts provide a foundation for Gherovici's thinking about psychoanalysis. She rethinks Lacan's notions of the Real, the nothing, the endless transformations of the body that pertain to plasticity, the clinamen, the death drive - all of which are shown to be key to her understanding of the trans experience as revealed in her clinical practice.

[i] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

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

In this psychoanalytic pamphlet, Croatian philosopher Karlo Pavlović analyses the perversions of the day. Considering the topic of ASMR, a key example of what he calls the generalised deployment of subtle pornography, of depictions of sexuality "in gloves", he argues that society today should be understood through the blue balls phenomenon. This concept, developed playfully by Pavlović, explains that we are all perverts taking the logic of the drive to its extreme; if the whole point of the drive is not to attain its object, but rather, to circle around it, the perverse subject (as the subject of the present times) has, in fact, no problems with this whatsoever.

Karlo Pavlović is completing his PhD in Philosophy at The University of Ljubljana, supervised by Alenka Zupančič.

This publication acts as a postscriptum to the exhibition project Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders by Simon Asencio for SB34—The Pool in Brussels. Dedicated to Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi and sexutopia novel, the exhibition was conceived as a process of annotating the book, expanding on the ethics discussed by the characters of the novel through installation, performative readings and with the complicity of other artists and their works. This devious object pursues such an intertextual process, extending and disseminating the writings forged by the exhibition. 

Cette publication se présente comme le post-scriptum de l'exposition de Simon Asencio Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders pour SB34—The Pool à Bruxelles. Dédiée au roman de science-fiction et de sexutopie de Samuel R. Delany dont elle porte le titre, l'exposition a été pensée comme un processus d'annotation de ce livre, développant les formes éthiques mises en pratique par les personnages du récit, à travers des installations, des lectures et situations performatives, avec la complicité d'autres artistes. Cet objet interlope poursuit ce processus intertextuel, en prolongeant et disséminant les écritures forgées par l'exposition.

With contributions by / avec les contributions de: Reinhold Aman, Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Jen Brodie, Chloe Chignell, Jack Cox, Samuel R. Delany, Diana Duta, Loucka Fiagan, gladys, Stefa Govaart, Sean Gurd, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Bernard-Marie Koltès, David J. Melnick, Matthieu Michaut, Margaret Miller, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum, Grisélidis Réal, Páola Revenióti, Sabrina Seifried, Raphaëlle Serres, Valerie Solanas, sabrina soyer, Megan Susman.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. It is as much a practice as it is a methodology or way of thinking, a multifaceted discipline that moves with society’s progression. Throughout the creative process behind every design, learnings happen. Designers learn to adapt, adjusting their positions relative to the context. This volume spotlights self-organised, spontaneous, sporadic, and informal educational initiatives within the realm of creative practices, both historical and contemporary. The initiatives presented here show that any attempt to control a narrative and limit it to a single understanding risks stifling potential innovations that might arise from unexpected origins.

Featuring contributions from Amanda Ariawan, Andriew Budiman, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Chabib Duto Hapsoro, Czar Kristoff J.P., Filippo Sciascia, Fiorent Fernisia, Gideon Kong, Jacob Lindgren, Jeremy Sharma, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Limestone Books, Livian Aurel V. Purwanto, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nishkra, Prananda L. Malasan, R.A. Dita Saraswati, Reza Afisina, Rouzel Waworuntu Saad, Savira Aristi, Trevor Embury, and Virliany Rizqia Putri.

In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style approach of internet theorist Joshua Citarella, as well as the practices of Alex Quicho and Sophie Public, this essay delves into the diverse strategies internet researchers adopt to share their work and sustain their careers more or less independently in today's era defined by the attention economy.

Charting the rise of subscription-based platforms and the increasing importance of engagement-driven metrics, Becoming the Product uncovers the tension between intellectual critique and the pressures of commodification. As the lines blur between rigorous scholarship, aesthetic branding, and market-driven content, Becoming the Product investigates the future of critical internet research and the sustainability of critical thinking as we know it in the digital age.

This book frequently uses the word ‘we’. We, as in the general public, engaged citizens, humans of planet Earth… And we, Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, together with our team at Daily tous les jours, as we seek new models for living together. Welcome to our journal. 

We crave living in environments that support us, nourish us and inspire us. We dream of places to go through our lives together, inclusively and tolerantly. Can we re-enchant the raw material of our collective daily experiences? We have been creating interactive art and narrative experiences in public spaces around the world for fifteen years. Using music, dance, art, and other mediums to emphasize the joyful, whimsical, and unexpected, we create moments of connection and care between strangers. 

Through this book, we share our experience in building an emergent practice combining technology, storytelling, performance, and design, while asking fundamental questions to create meaningful work in a world in crisis. Meet us outside the urban masterplan, where we experiment with infrastructure for the human spirit.

Design Fiction is a method to vividly render tangible futures by creating material artifacts that represent the implications of change. Design Fiction is as much a mindset as it is a methodology whereby foresight, research, expectations, strategic direction, and planning can be cohered into representational ‘artifacts from possible futures.’from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices.

Over fifteen years in the making, this book explores the origins of design fiction, and details the practical approach to assessing the consequences of decision making by creating tangible artifacts from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices. The writers of this book have used design fiction approaches with clients such as Apple, Warner Bros, IKEA, Edelman, Dubai Museum of the Future, Google and Facebook, and they aim to bring these techniques to a wider audience through the publication of this book.

Written by Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova in collaboration with Patrick Pittman and Chris Frey of No Media Co. Designed by Chris Lange