Books

This book/catalogue is published on the occasion of the final event of Noa & Snow, a gentle experiment between the everyday and the event, at the Volkskundemuseum, Vienna.

Publication Concept Alix Eynaudi, Goda Budvytytė
Design Goda Budvytytė
Printing Robstolk, Amsterdam
Edition 600 copies
Proofreading Bella Marrin

ENVELOPE Pattern design based on the Lila Dress and its signature cording by An Breugelmans

LE VESTIAIRE
Costumes & objects An Breugelmans Tapestries & trompe-l’oeil Cécile Tonizzo Weaves Lydia McGlinchey Photos taken inside of Jason Dodge’ show Cut a Door in the Wolf at Macro Museum by Carlotta Pierleoni Photos in Vienna Samuel Feldhandler

THEM, PROTEXTIONS
Han-Gyeol Lie, Mette Edvartsen, Lydia McGlinchey, Clara Amaral, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Jennifer Lacey, Cécile Tonizzo, Sabina Holzer, Alice Chauchat, Jason Dodge, Joachim Hamou, Quim Pujol, Litó Walkey, Serena Lee, Mihret Kebede

PUBLIC MEDITATIONS
Anne Faucheret, Elizabeth Ward, Kirsty Bell, Tony Just, Sabina Holzer, Samuel Feldhandler, Frida Robles

TEXTURAGES Paula Caspão VIGNETTES Alix Eynaudi

Poster picture of Claire Lefèvre’s Grimoire/Giant Notebook/Bison Book Rasa Juškevičiūtė

INSTITUTE OF REST(S)
Alix Eynaudi, Paula Caspão, Quim Pujol
Back side A thread for Alix Eynaudi, woven as a table placement by Genė Janušauskaitė in 1936, out of the flax she had sawn and harvested herself. Photographed by Kristien Daem in 2022, after Aldona Malašauskienė revealed the placement to her son Raimundas.

Improvisation infiltrates almost all dance, theatre and music practices, but when it becomes the essential modality through which performance is constructed, when it becomes a specific practice, a technique, a knowledge, an artistic trend, shouldn’t another word have been invented? When, moreover, this improvisation is practised, transmitted and commented on, at least since the 1960s in the United States, before it was picked up in Europe, don't we need for a book written by those who practise it, transmit it and carry it out at the heart of a lively practice today? This is a book which brings together content and form, an effervescent book which talks about improvisation, about "real time composition", by improvising.

ONE SHOT, dialogues on real time composition, written by Meg Stuart and Mark Tompkins, with images by video artist Gilles Toutevoix.

Cavity examines the spatial relations between the self and the home, exploring notions of gender, motherhood, and domesticity. How do we form our identities in response to our immediate surroundings? How does the household engender a sense of identity? Is the home human? My poetics of dissent consider nontraditional forms of family, sexual identity and self-discovery, and gender roles and expectations within the home.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

New perspectives on the process of translation from the works of more than thirty international artists.

"[…] what I consider to be one of the most important arts of the future: the art of translation."
—Édouard Glissant

With The Poetry of Translation, Kunst Meran Merano Arte investigates the compelling phenomenon of translation. Over seventy works by over thirty artists shed light on the process of translation from novel perspectives

Inspired by the living multilingual environment of South Tyrol and its eventful history of interethnic cohabitation, Kunst Meran Merano Arte offers the ideal context for a research on translation and questions surrounding identity, multiculturalism, and diversity. The essays and visuals included in the book address translation in its complexity: on the one hand, as a source of inclusion, international understanding, creativity, genius and poetry, while on the other as a cause of misunderstanding and exclusion. It is understood here as a creative process through which something new is always created.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunst Meran Merano Arte in 2021-2022, with Amelia Etlinger, Anna Esposito, Annika Kahrs, Anri Sala, Augusto De Campos, Babi Badalov, Ben Vautier, Carla Accardi, Cerith Wyn Evans, Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader, Elisabetta Gut, Ettore Favini, Franco Marini, Franz Pichler, Freundeskreis, Jorel Heid & Alexandra Griess, Heinz Gappmayr, Irma Blank, Johann Georg Hettinger, Jorinde Voigt, Kader Attia, Katja Aufleger, Ketty La Rocca, Kinkaleri, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lawrence Weiner, Leander Schwazer, Lena Iglisonis, Lenora De Barros, Lucia Marcucci, Maria Stockner, Marilla Battilana, Michele Galluzzo & Franziska Weitgruber, Mirella Bentivoglio, Otto Neurath, Siggi Hofer, Slavs and Tatars, Tomaso Binga.

A collection of writings by Alina Popa and Florin Flueras written over a seven-year period.

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programming, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.

New expanded edition of the book first published in 2019.

Alina Popa (1982-2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art.

Florin Flueras (born 1978 in Târgu Mureș, Romania) oscillates between contemporary performance, visual arts and theory as contexts in which he activates.

Proposed by Chris Evans, Sudden Wealth is a collaboration with Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Graham Kelly and invited poets and artists who use spoken word as their medium. 

Sudden Wealth looks to how the flux of subjectivity in language can be shaped, agitated and re-imagined through a triangulation between written composition, intonation, and extrinsic sound composition. The latter spans analogue and digital instrumentation, foley recordings and algorithmically derived musical patterns. Divergent methods of composition work on and into a voice, modelling intonation, and affecting its sense and intent. 

This first iteration has been made with Roy Claire Potter, an artist who tells stories from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings. A rapid vocal delivery, a sense of restricted or partial views of space, complex social and group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are recurrent strands of Potter’s writing, which are often delivered with a dark and sometimes wilful humour. 

Chris Evans was the bassist with the now defunct Life Without Buildings and has previously produced musical compositions with Morten Norbye Halvorsen together with farmers and accountants for his ongoing series ‘Jingle’. Graham Kelly joins Evans and Halvorsen for this present series, Sudden Wealth.

Vocals: Roy Claire Potter.
Electronics: Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Bass: Chris Evans.
Guitar: Graham Kelly.
Arranged and mixed by Morten Norbye Halvorsen.

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling as method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town.
 
The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola.
     
The Fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, which is to say that they are a means to invite guides to beam light onto the investigation from multiple angles—historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary, and more. The guides are influential researchers and writers whose insights, experiences, and reflections shaped the investigation. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form; each contribution will, in turn, occasion a set of gatherings during which the text will be read aloud.

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling as method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town.
 
The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola.
     
The Fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, which is to say that they are a means to invite guides to beam light onto the investigation from multiple angles—historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary, and more. The guides are influential researchers and writers whose insights, experiences, and reflections shaped the investigation. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form; each contribution will, in turn, occasion a set of gatherings during which the text will be read aloud.

The Struwwelpeter and other creatures cavort in a sunlit and happy garden. They all give in to their craving to dig their fingers father inside an adventure reminiscent of both Warhol’s ‘In the Bottom of My Garden’ and Bruegel’s ‘Children’s Games’. Graphic designer and illustrator Olga Prader’s whimsical colouring book makes sure we all know that strict virtue is a hoax. C’est bien!

The ninety-six objects in this inventory are sourced from earwitness interviews Lawrence Abu Hamdan conducted as well as from trial transcripts across the globe. After SFX explores the ways we remember sound and the ways in which cinematic sound effects have created a collective acoustic unconscious. What is revealed is our difficulty in describing these memories when precision is vital. The objects listed here stand in for a missing sonic vocabulary, a language we do not yet speak. [publisher's note]

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

Never does the patient seem more ill than when they try to order associations into a logical tale. Classical analysis sees this in terms of a repudiation of sexuality: an attempt to avoid speaking from a place of desire. But why should psychoanalysis reduce everything to sex? If sex only ever achieves partial satisfactions, fragments of pleasure, its pursuit creates our subjectivity and our world.

Disorganisation & Sex argues that the sexuality of psychoanalysis is not a reductive biologism, but an archaic remainder that cannot be colonised, endlessly disorienting meaning in our everyday lives. It is our proximity to this terrain that undoes our most tedious habits, and opens onto something revelatory.

Charged by the Venetian Inquisition with the conscious and cynical feigning of holiness, Cecelia Ferrazzi (1609-1684) requested and obtained the unprecedented opportunity to defend herself through a presentation of her life story. Ferrazzi’s unique inquisitorial autobiography and the transcripts of her preceding testimony, expertly transcribed and eloquently translated into English, allow us to enter an unfamiliar sector of the past and hear ’another voice’—that of a humble Venetian woman who had extraordinary experiences and exhibited exceptional courage.

Born in 1609 into an artisan family, Cecilia Ferrazzi wanted to become a nun. When her parents’ death in the plague of 1630 made it financially impossible for her to enter the convent, she refused to marry and as a single laywoman set out in pursuit of holiness. Eventually she improvised a vocation: running houses of refuge for “girls in danger,” young women at risk of being lured into prostitution.

Ferrazzi’s frequent visions persuaded her, as well as some clerics and acquaintances among the Venetian elite, that she was on the right track. The socially valuable service she was providing enhanced this impresssion. Not everyone, however, was convinced that she was a genuine favorite of God. In 1664 she was denounced to the Inquisition. 

The Inquisition convicted Ferrazzi of the pretense of sanctity. Yet her autobiographical act permits us to see in vivid detail both the opportunities and the obstacles presented to seventeenth-century women.

Amor Cringe explores the dually base and beautiful aspects of self-obsessed media culture. In a perennial bohemian style, an unnamed, ungendered protagonist travels from coast to coast and affair to affair, stumbling upon various moments of failure, absurd insight, and flashes of transcendence.

Half traditionally-written and half AI-generated, Amor Cringe is a "deepfake autofiction" novelette about a TikTok influencer that seeks God, created with the intention to be "as cringe as possible." The result is a painfully self-aware series of encounters that exfoliate the repulsive and fascinating aesthetics of romantic life under social media.

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

More than 130 artists and authors from different generations participated in 2021 in an open call to mark the 50th anniversary of Linda Nochlin's essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? This resulted in four digital fanzines that we now turned into a fierce publication in the tradition of the first feminist print work. Chloé D'hauwe took care of the no fuzz design.

Editors: Els Roelandt and Jessica Gysel
Texts: Olave Nduwanje and Delphine Bedel (ao)
Translations: Irene de Craen en Euphemia Ophelders
Design: Chloé D’hauwe
Cover: Christine Clinckx, Penelope, video still 2004
Print: Antilope de Bie Printing, Duffel
Riso: Risiko Press, Borgerhout
Year: 2022
Amount of pages: 228
Dimensions: 28 x 21 cm
Edition: 600 copies

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life. 

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

Cold Heaven joins two plays, Sometimes Dead is Better and Bye Bye Brunhilde, with an introduction by the author. Both plays have the dissonant, radical beauty of poetry.

As Roy writes in her Introduction to the book: “Plays are porous, written to be entered… Plays provide a frame for studying collisions… Language can be an (uncontrollable) character, moving in on the others, creating a stir… [I]n a play… the private self disappears. Writing can move out into the dead zone between any two people and test what is there.”

Imagine a Punch and Judy as lesbians whose domestic and sexual squabbles are paraded in the language of brilliant poets; these are Camille Roy's Fear and Technique. A wonderful play.

This book is a reprint from a scan of what appears to be the last remaining copy of Symbolic Messages in public libraries worldwide, at the university library of Manitoba College, Canada. Clinical psychologist Mario Pazzaglini first published his extensive collection of case studies in alien writing and received scripts in 1991. This book is a photocopy of the original edition. Editorial manipulations of the material are minimal and where they have been made, it was from lack of information or else for reasons of practicality and cost efficiency: There is no solid evidence of the original binding, printing technique, paper, etc. The original book seems to have been layed out in American letter format and has been scaled down to fit the proportions of European ready-to-order print formats and provide easier readability. Apart from these minor adjustments, the copy is as faithful to the original, as possible.

Sun of an Ignored Putrid Productivity is a speculative novel about the influence of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological progress on our human interactions. The dialogical script is based on personal reflections and pop-cultural, scientific and philosophical references from the beginnings of cybernetics to more recent voices. Randomly generated, constructed and quoted contents cannot be distinguished from each other. The borderline between fact and fiction becomes blurred. What is left is a flickering effect, disorientation, which reflects our perception of reality under conditions of never-ending information overflow.

I travel far across the city, cut it knowingly, concealing behind me the entrances to tunnels, altering the signage. I traverse the grimiest bowels, skirt the farthest wettest edges like a silverfish active only in the hallucinatory hours, to avoid becoming known, to avoid any collusion between my body and theirs, its. 

Under the neon sky of a sick city, which might be London, a nameless governess oscillates between lucidity and dissociation, solitude and communication, wage labour and escape attempts. A wild and unreliable narrator-without-character—ardent, delirious, complicit, vengeful, and paranoid—she embodies a perverse and chaotic resistance. Simultaneously demonic and angelic, both maniacal and generous in her fury, accidentally elegant, tongue tied and barbed, she veers towards defiance as devotion. An anti-Bildungsroman in the collapsing first person, Yes, I Am A Destroyer is an unbecoming record of memory and forgetting, of a relentless undoing. 

‘Any girl who learns how to read is already a lost girl, wrote the infamous confessionalist Rousseau. But if that lost girl, with insatiable pronoun, bastard spawn perhaps of the exiled Genevan, palmed a pen and confessed—how would that read? What can she know? With relentless intelligence and urgent prosody, Mira Mattar shows us. She invents a narrator in the raging anti-tradition of Violette Leduc and Albertine Sarrazin, leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection. Much like the young Jean-Jacques, she’s a tutor underpaid for her sensitivity. She is, like him, a thief of small things, a sponge for the edifying comportments of the employing class. What she makes of her servitude—a fabulously grotesque encyclopedia of sensing—is dedicated to female anger. Scrubbing, washing, chewing, frigging, barfing, stealing, moisturising, shitting: every surface, every gesture, is appropriated to her bodily resistance.  ‘Live anyway’ is her stoic motto. This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.’ 
–> Lisa Robertson 

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is an independent researcher, editor, and tutor. A Palestinian/Jordanian born in the suburbs of London, she continues to live and work there. She has read and published her work widely. Yes, I Am A Destroyer is her first book.

Imagine that we too (imagine that I too), wanted to welcome ideas, to attend to them, to take care of them, to make sure they have a good time. Imagine that I too wanted to be a good hostess to writing ideas. How to be open to them, how to be alert to them—so that I know how and when to let them in? 

ENTERTAINING IDEAS began as a reading exercise: an effort to perform a ‘good reading’ of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View(1956), and to think about what a ‘good’ short reading of a long novel might mean, what it might look like or read like. As a translator, Kate Briggs accepts that writing out a reading involves change, tampering with what seems perfect, and doing so from necessity, as a way of learning how exactly it works. She has changed Howard’s book. Her exercise changed too, expanding unexpectedly into a set of reflections on writing backwards, living forwards, and entertaining ideas.

‘Kate Briggs generously shares with us her unique and delicately revolutionary way of reading; the moment where writing becomes the only way to grasp our slippery thoughts and desires. This book is pure joy.’
– >Alejandro Zambra

Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL. She is the translator of two volumes of lecture and seminar notes by Roland Barthes (Columbia University Press, 2011 and 2013). Other publications include:Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (Information as Material, 2011), On Reading as an Alternation of Flights and Perchings (NO Press, 2013), and The Nabokov Paper (Information as Material, 2013). This Little Art, a long essay on the practice of translation, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017.