And Then Comes the Chorus

When he was prevented from guiding a writing workshop, Quim Pujol resorted to collecting exercises for the participants to work with by themselves, either alone or in small groups. These exercises, suggestions and scores draw on a wide variety of sources, such as poetry, experimental literature, dance, popular performance practices, visual art and all kinds of text populating everyday life. Now expanded into a book, they are invitations to read, write and daydream, to ‘complicate our relationship to language’ and imagine texts in multiple guises. Potential literatures that give pause, redirect the attention or, at times, simply ‘produce a comforting doodle in the volatile palimpsest of human flesh’.

Quim Pujol is an experimental artist and curator working at the crossroads of language and live arts.

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

A performance text by Jozef Wouters, The Soft Layer traces and proposes visions and words that enfold the historic building of Dar Bairam Turki in Tunis like a cloak. How can we imagine possible futures for such a place and the community inhabiting it, beyond nostalgia and the spectres of the past? Several voices muse in three languages (Tunisian, French and English) on renovation and history, destruction and cleansing, the limits of science-fiction and the soothing quality of aloe vera.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition May 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN 978-82-691492-4-1

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

Dans cet ouvrage, malheureusement son dernier, Mark Fisher revisite des artefacts culturels familiers afin de cartographier les variétés de l’étrange dont ils sont porteurs. Longtemps sensible aux dimensions bizarre et omineuse qu’il devinait, sans les nommer, entre autres dans les œuvres de Lovecraft, les films de David Lynch ou les albums de The Fall, M. Fisher tente ici la synthèse essentielle d’un questionnement qui l’avait hanté, jusqu’à ce livre.

Avec son regard si particulier, celui du critique culturel tout à la fois pop et moderniste, puisant aux sources de la psychanalyse et du marxisme, Fisher se penche sur des objets sensibles pour y saisir les rapports entre présence et absence, entre ce qui devrait être mais n’est pas, ce qui ne devrait pas se présenter mais survient. C’est en compagnie de ces spectres — du titre d’un autre ouvrage — que nous sommes invités à voyager, pour questionner les formes mêmes de nos existences sociales, jusqu’aux frontières de l’étrange.

An experimental essay on voice, narrative, literature and translation. In this text Daniela tunes into the hums of voices heard within books, to the recollected csitation, to singing with stitched lips.