OEI #92-93 Lettrist Corpus: The Complete Magazines (1946–2016)

Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, co-editors at INCA Press (along with Irena Borić), are the guest-editors of this issue of OEI: it contains essays, artworks, and archival materials by 21 artists, theorists, writers, and artist-run spaces (mostly from the Americas).

The subject of the issue is art and neoliberalism, and it encompasses essays, images and other works by Dorothée Dupuis, Max Jorge Hindered Cruz, Luciano Concheiro, Yvonne Osei, Diego Bruno, John Riepenhoff, Suhail Malik, Good Weather, The Luminary, Bikini Wax, Beta-Local and more.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

New Ancient Words is the first translation of Ellen Lima Wassu's poetry into English. A trilingual edition between her native Tupi indigenous language of the land of Pindorama, now Brazil, Portuguese, and English, this collection offers a wider readership her resistant yet intimate poetry, which flows seamlessly between her relational woes, a decolonial voice, and an animated playfulness with words and imagery. In her poems, history is an unstable landscape, where the personal, the mythical, and the natural are ever entwined and ever shifting in meaning.

Ellen Lima Wassu is a multiartist, freshwater fish, perplexed human, apartment gardener, and more beast than person. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is Indigenous to the Wassu Cocal people (Alagoas, Brazil) and currently lives in Portugal, where she is pursuing a PhD, developing artistic practices, teaching courses, giving lectures, and working as an activist. In addition to contributing to literary magazines and anthologies, she has published ybykûatiara um livro de terra (Urutau, 2023) and ixé ygara voltando pra ’y’kûá (Urutau, 2021). Her practice weaves together art, poetry, performance, activism, critique, counter-colonial studies, essayistic writing, good encounters, river baths, listening sessions, and conversations with flowers.

Translation by Isadora Neves Marques and Alice dos Reis, revised by Marta Espiridião

This publication is based on a project by Despina Vassiliadou that ran from 2015-16. It presents a collection of photographs taken during the period, accompanied by fictional short stories.

Partie sur les sites de la dernière briqueterie artisanale de Riemst et de la recyclerie de briques d'Alexander van Mosselaer, Juliet Mérie en ramène un récit poétique qui explore notre rapport à la matière vivante et questonne le cours de la vie. 

Loin d'être un documentaire, ses photographies créent un rapport ambigu entre la perception des espaces visités et l'allégorie qui s'installe. La possière se soulève pour dévoiler les lieux de vie et de mort des briques qui dessinent le paysage belge. 

Strange Biology, Charlotte Strange’s first chapbook, opens with a social media advertisement marketing a probiotic as an alternative to the “nuclear bomb” of antibacterial acne medication. As Strange investigates the treatment of the human body as a landscape submissive to medical intervention, they ruminate on the contemporary relationship between microbes, gut-directed medical technologies, and capitalism’s encroachment on life. Drawing on the vernacular of social media marketing, they deftly oscillate between instructive and personal registers, stretching the private across a nexus of microbial interminglings. Strange Biology reflects on the semiotic science of the gut: how the language of medicine defines the mutating edges of the human body. 

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.