Henry Andersen

This reader brings together artistic and theoretical contributions on the instertitial nature of sound. This issue is addressed through a variety of prisms, such as format, language, politics, or new technologies.

The Middle Matter is a reader which brings together thoughts on the nature of sound; its substance, specific qualities, and potential—with a specific curiosity to its propensity to occupy the spaces in-between, the instertitial gaps between different spaces, times, cultures, and world views, between the interior body and the exterior space.

Through a number of artistic and theoretical contributions, observations are made around the notion of “audience” and the attendant questions of format, on the effects of old and new technologies, of communal working processes, and the complexity of language, the contributors reveal sound to be a material particularly apt at negotiating these zones of and between contact.

It is a large field of in-betweenness, sound travels, hops borders, passes through walls, its messages for a large part being transported involuntarily and even unconsciously. In this sense sound is extensively participative, entangled in the complicated gaps between bodies, minds and objects through and against which it resonates.

In 1987, artist and poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014) and her partner, painter Arakawa (1936–2010), formed the Architectural Body Research Foundation (later to become the Reversible Destiny Foundation)—an architectural office pursuing the radical conviction that architecture would provide humanity with the necessary tools and training to overcome death. Their wide variety of theories investigated how a person might interact with their environment, and how that environment might condition and enhance the body to increase its capabilities—through a constant undoing and unsettling of subject formation. Taking the work and writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa as a broad provocation, The Floor Is Uneven. Does It Slope? aims to swallow and masticate the duo’s thought into a new sort of pulp: a collective fan fiction work. Less a book about Gins and Arakawa than a book after them, it tries to seed their work to various fans—writers and makers indebted to the duo’s thinking or suspected to be enthralled by it. 

Contributors speak about Gins and Arakawa through the language of their own practice, through academia, poetry, essays, photography, experimental writing, and fiction—thinking about what Gins and Arakawa might mean to their individual fields. 

Texts by Henry Andersen, Lila Athanasiadou, Ben Thorp Brown, Lucas Crawford, Bryana Fritz, Laura Herman, Daisuke Kosugi, Joyelle McSweeney, Simone C. Niquille, Andros Zins-Browne.

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.

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.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition that took place at Maison Pelgrims (10/9-23/10/2021), the book presents original interventions by the artists of the rosa rosae rosae project : Alicia Jeannin, Alicja Melzacka, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Audrey Cottin, buren, Charlie Usher, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Eva Giolo, Henry Andersen, Jan Vercruysse, Maíra Dietrich, Marc Buchy, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Niels Poiz, Oriol Vilanova, Sabir (Lucie Guien, Amélie Derlon Cordina, Sophie Sénécaut / Perrine Estienne,  Kevin Senant, Maud Marique, Pauline Allié, Carole Louis), Slow Reading Club, Sofia Caesar, Surya Ibrahim, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Yoann Van Parys

Edited by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou / SB34
Graphic design by Tipode Office
The book was produced with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (aide à l'édition) and Région Bruxelles-Capitale (Image de Bruxelles)

This edition is published on the occasion of the YES sessions by Slow Reading Club (Bryanna Fritz & Henry Andersen with the participation of Maud Jacquin) organized by Lafayette Anticipations as part of EXTRA! Le festival de la littérature vivante (4th edition, from September 11 to 27, 2020 at the Centre Pompidou).