Pages 11 - Stage So Near So Far

In Kish, An Island Indecisive by Design, artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore the modern development of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf. Removed from mainland Iran, Kish is a place where extremes in politics, ideology and urban design intersect. The island's many years of infrastructural indecision is distinctly evident in its architecture, which lacks any trace of coherence or feel for locale. This volume gives an often moving account of the chaos of middle-eastern modernity.

The theme of this issue of Pages was triggered by the idea of opium smoke as a ‘writing machine.’ Since the early opium trade, there has been writing not only on opium, but also through opium, especially in countries linked to past and present drug networks. In this issue we are tapping into the deeply rooted relationship between writing and drugs, especially beyond the Western literary tradition, and wondering about the current conceptual and material derivatives of intoxication with which we can machinate new extremities in our chemical, historical and technological relations to the world.

With contributions by:

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / Smoke, Drug, Poison: A Philosophy of the Faramoosh-Khaneh (Opium Den)
- Pages / Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring (the Smoke)
- Hung-Bin Hsu / The Taste of Opium: Science, Monopoly and the Japanese Colonization in Taiwan, 1895—1945
- Saleh Najafi / Hedayat: The Opium of Translation and Creating the Impossible Memory
- Patricia Reed / The Toxicity of Continuity
- Fuko Mineta / A Monster Appears in Qingtian
- Morad Farhadpour / Inside and Outside Addiction
- Mohammad-Ali Rahebi / Of Junk and Time: Trauma, Habit, Capitalism

This issue of Pages assumes seep as a post archival mode: in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the verb 'seep' is translated as follows: to flow or pass slowly through fine pores or small openings, to enter or penetrate slowly, to become diffused or spread.

The biology or politics of seeping is like that of raw petroleum oozing at natural oil seeps. Unlike refined oil which has sponsored modernization and its aligned archives, crude oil pours beyond historical purpose and defies structural elevations. It instead disfigures the ground through which it dubiously spreads.

Seeping is a posthumous affair. It is the gradual leaking of a long withdrawn interior. Like the bleeding of a punctured corpse, when the pumping of the heart has stopped, when the body is lifeless and apathetic to any 'hail', yet continuing to bleed. Seep as archive is an eternally post-apocalyptic expansion, retraction, deviation, subtraction, or simply the arrival of (non-)things.

With contributions by:

- Mariam Motamedi Fraser / Geo-Archive
- Richard Goldstein / Dennis Oppenheim's Dilemma: Should he Sell Art to the Shah?
- Babak Afrassiabi, Nasrin Tabatabai / Contemporary Hole / Unfilmable 
/ Seep
- Saleh Najafi / Wounds of Archive¹
- Mark von Schlegell / The Artist Abstract #6
- Nima Parzham / The underground
- Adam Kleinman / Vanished Theories
- Suzanne Treister / Algorithm
- Alexi Kukuljevic / The Dissolute Subject
- Matts Leiderstam / Andy Warhol, Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), 1963
- Eugene Thacker / Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans
- Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Ginwala / Infrastructural Suspensions: Global Spanning, Atmospheric Seepage and Measures of the Undecidable

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

This publication brings together two original screenplays for yet-realized video works by Robinson along with a collection of research material presented as a retrograde calendar. The screenplays, / Imagine Prompt: Catfish Monogamy and The Jealousy of Sagittarius A*, both deal with contemporary life and creative labor as they intersect with digital culture and current anxieties regarding AI. In addition, the screenplays are followed by A Faggot is a Unit (Homage to Hanne Darboven), a collection of archival photographs, scanned objects and ephemera, as well as stock imagery and graphics from the internet collected by Robinson over the course of seven years (2015–2021). The imagery further splits the disorienting narratives presented in the two screenplays to offer a kaleidoscopic and unpredictable way of reading stories while functioning simultaneously as visual companion and counterpoint to the scripts.

Writing and editing is central to Robinson’s published and film work, inquiring into queer histories and the contemporary economy of the image, not as novelty subjects in themselves, but as forms of knowledge integral to questioning histories of perceived liberation. We are committed to representing diverse voices and perspectives that challenge and build upon our vision of bringing material from the fast-paced digital experience to the book form.

Padraig Robinson is a Berlin-based artist, filmmaker and writer. 

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

JJ brings together articles by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston, translated into French for the first time, as well as texts, poems and drawings by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a dance critic, performer, writer, and feminist and lesbian activist. Her books include Marmalade Me (1971), Lesbian Nation (1973), Gullibles Travels (1974) and numerous articles in The Village Voice.

Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Translated from the English (American) by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).