Archive Dora Diamant #2

Facsimilé d'un carnet inédit de Pascal Doury réalisé par Jonas Delaborde (Der Vierte Pförtner Verlag) et co-produit par les Editions l'Amazone, réalisé dans le cadre de la publication des Archives Elles Sont de Sortie suite à la parution de Choquer le monde à mort. Elles Sont de sortie. Bruno Richard - Pascal Doury.

"Elles sont de sortie" is the title of a periodic publication launched in 1977 by Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. The plural and feminine form of the enigmatic phrase "elles sont de sortie," chosen almost by chance, announces a protean work and often collective experience. From its origins to the most recent iterations, including Doury's more confidential individual trajectory after "Elles sont de sortie," Choquer le Monde à Mort traces five decades of a corpus of nearly three hundred publications. It addresses some of the most emblematic editorial works, as well as others that remain unpublished, alongside ambitious and sometimes scandalous exhibitions, few of which are documented.

This work is the result of several years of research, enriched by numerous firsthand interviews, and unfolds in three parts: a chronology and analysis of a singular and marginal artistic history, works and iconographic documents, and an anthology bibliography. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of an editorial object with porous boundaries, both in its forms and its contents, oscillating between graphzine, artist book, poetry collection, and personal journal. Its ramifications, status, and legacy retrospectively reveal the importance of a discreet yet seminal work.

Thus, "Elles Sont de Sortie" also serves as an opportunity to revisit the paths of two aesthetic and provocative artists, deeply devoted to their art and true free spirits in an art world often too narrow for them. It immerses us in a plethora of works that are intimate and raw, as well as subtle and refined, all in service of a project that, in Doury's words, aims to "shock the world to death."

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc, Jonas Delaborde, Anna Lejemmetel.
Contribution by Anna Lejemmetel.

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Figurehead of the Parisian underground and queer nights, photographer, DJ, multimedia and polymorphic artist, Dora Diamant was the daughter of Pascal Doury.

Selected by Yamil Farah and Mélanie Matranga.

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Figurehead of the Parisian underground and queer nights, photographer, DJ, multimedia and polymorphic artist, Dora Diamant was the daughter of Pascal Doury.

Selected by Clara Pacotte and Esmé Planchon.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

An homage and reimagining of the classic German Bildungsroman, Schernikau paid tribute to the form even as he challenged stylistic, sexual, and political conventions. Written in all lower-case, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is a brilliant stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows b, a teenager navigating politics and queer desire in a small, West German town. When b—who is interested in communism and knitting—falls in love with leif, a popular jock, b’s life at school is very predictably upended.

“A mighty, slender record of the provocative intelligence of a queer teenage mind.” —Eliot Duncan

Ronald M. Schernikau was born in 1960 in Magdeburg, East Germany and grew up in Hanover, West Germany. After completing his Abitur in 1980, he moved to West Berlin and studied German literature, philosophy, and psychology. In 1986, he started studying at the Institut für Literatur Johannes R. Becher (German Institute for Literature) in Leipzig, GDR. In 1989 he obtained GDR citizenship and relocated to Berlin. He worked as a dramaturge, and in radio and TV until his death in 1991. His publications include Kleinstadtnovelle (Small-Town Novella, 1980); Die Tage in L. (The Days in L., 1989); Legende (Legends, 1999); Königin im Dreck (Queen in the Dirt, 2009); and Irene Binz. Die Befragung (Irene Binz. The Interview, 2010).

Lucy Jones is a British translator and writer based in Berlin. She is the translator of Brigitte Reimann’s Siblings, (Penguin Modern Classics), Anke Stelling’s Higher Ground (Scribe) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Lyric Novella (Seagull Books), among others. Her translations and book reviews have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders and CulturMag. She is the runner-up for the Society of Author’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 2023.

PRAISE

“This slender book is a fierce account of queer teenage imagination: provocative, haughty, coy, insolent, and wild. As angsty as it is intelligent, Schernikau’s prose also feels protective and sweet. SMALLTOWNNOVELLA is the book, the friend, I wish I had in high school.” —Eliot Duncan

“…an earnest, seemingly offhand account of a brilliant young man growing up in a small town and realizing that his queerness and his communist politics will come to structure his life. (…) the first of Schernikau’s many attempts to lay out a gay politics that would open him to the world rather than fating him to a specific lot within it: an identity politics not constructed to elaborate and defend a single perspective, but one that sought to locate the self within a broader movement to transform society." —Ben Miller & Nicholas Courtman, LARB

There is no such thing as a safe word. 

In Bad Language, So Mayer blends memoir and manifesto as they explore the politics of speech, while looking at how language has been used – and abused – in their own life. What is the relationship between language and sexual violence? And how can we ‘make ourselves up’ in language when words themselves are encoded by a dominant culture that insists we see ourselves as powerless listeners rather than active speakers? 

Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. 

‘Mayer’s writing is generous, astute and sincere; in Bad Language, they choose their words carefully, using incantation and spell to distil a complex argument – the transformative power of language lay in its ability to shape sense perception. For Mayer, the task of ‘making ourselves up’ is another way of asking, what kind of world do we want to live in?’ – Lola Olufemi

SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing.