Retrospective

The fourth issue of the annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales, around the topic of voice.

The voice is everywhere, infiltrating everything, making civilisation, marking out territories with infinite borders, spreading from the farthest reaches to the most intimate spaces. It can be neither reduced nor summarised. And accordingly, when taken as a theme, the voice is inexhaustible, even when seen in the light of its very particular relation with the sonic or the musical, as is the case in most of the texts collected in this volume. There is no point therefore in trying to circumscribe or amalgamate the multiple avatars of the voice. We must rather try to apprehend what the voice can do, to envisage its landscape, its potential effects.
 
Spectres is an annual publication dedicated to sound and music experimentation, co-published by Shelter Press and Ina GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Edited by François J. Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson.

Contributions by Joan La Barbara, Sarah Hennies, Peter Szendy, Youmna Saba, Lee Gamble, Ghédalia Tazartès, David Grubbs, Stine Janvin, Pierre Schaeffer, Akira Sakata, Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, Yannick Guédon, François J. Bonnet, John Giorno.

The Whisper is Félicia Atkinson's new artist's book, bringing together photographs, drawings and poems. They revolve around the eponymous installation located on the pointe d'Agon, on the west coast in Normandy. On a dune acquired by the artist for the Conservatoire du Littoral, stands a pierced wooden sculpture. Around this sculpture, inside this wild dune and facing the sea, the walker is invited to become a whisperer, and listen to what surrounds him. 

What if whispering could be a metaphor for a way of creating and living within biodiversity? Observing and listening, being present to the world while only leaving gentle trace? The studio then becomes a garden, the exhibition space a dune, deep listening a method of working and exchanging with the public and the reader.

Experimental musician, sound and visual artist Félicia Atkinson (born 1981) lives on the wild coast of Normandy (France). She has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on Shelter Press, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. 
For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don't speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character's tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist. 

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories, and the often accidental influences that have shaped how their practices have developed.

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

How to Sleep Faster is published as part of the collaborative discussion that form the critical direction of the gallery. and sits alongside the first two exhibitions – Sleep Faster (February), and How to Carve Totem Poles (March). It has been put together as an open ended continuation of this dialogue through which we seek to understand the contradictions / complexities that define and form our experience, existence and participation in a contemporary digital-analogue creative environment.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Jammie Nicholas, Laura Farley (eds).

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Krõõt Juurak

In the past fifteen years, Krõõt Juurak has developed a series of practices and performances that do not necessarily take place in a theatre or a gallery, at a predictable time or space, but rather come to existence as performative conditions through certain other triggers. This volume is both a record and a performative expansion of Juurak’s practice. Through four themed chapters (Animal, Family, Bad Mood Audience and Sleeping Bad Mood), the publication features a rich array of text-based works, essays, interviews, documentation and ephemera that will provide an insight into Juurak’s singular body of work including Internal Conflict, Sleeping Performance, Autodomestication, Performances for Pets and Bad Mood.

Edited by Galerie / Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio

Text contributions by Krõõt Juurak, Alex Bailey, Kate Strain, Noor Mertens, Suzan D. Polat, Jessica Ullrich, Guendalina Pirelli, Donny Mahonney, Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen.

Published October 2020