Wrap, History and Syncope

Writing from the body, from nervous impulses, sensations and gestures, but also from our being carried by matter, language and history, Sabina Holzer explores how writing may become ‘a way of singing and slip over into liminal, latent meanings and potentials.’ How to stay close to the body of the word? To perceive some of the multiplicity of our reality and ways of being, she incorporates somatic practices, ecology and new materialism, fables and science fiction in her writing. Allow me to dream a body with you gathers poetic essays and stories that delve into the fine grain of our corporeal entanglements and embeddedness. ‘Would an encounter between you and me be possible without all this?’

Sabina Holzer works in the field of expanded choreography. Her performances, interventions and texts explore the ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies with particular attention to movement and matter. She engages in practices of collaboration, philosophy, ecology, science fiction and poetry.

Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

Skies is a practice that emerged when Edurne Rubio and María Jerez found themselves working in isolation during the creation process of their performance A Nublo in 2020. A dialogue in pictures capturing the skies above Madrid, Brussels and many other places, it is now a book and document of a particular time that invites others to reminisce as they read the clouds and ponder invisible worlds that haunt the aether. It comes with an essay by Augusto Corrieri on theatre and cosmos.

Edurne Rubio is a visual artist. Her work leans towards the documentary and starts out from orality and storytelling. 

María Jerez creates work at the intersection of choreo graphy, film and visual art. With her work, she wants to open up spaces of possibility through the encounter with what is foreign to us.

www.edurnerubio.org
www.mariajerez.com

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition October 2022
200 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-6-5
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

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

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.

David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.

David Melnick was born in Illinois in 1938 and raised in Los Angeles, educated at the University of Chicago (where he studied with Hannah Arendt) and the University of California at Berkeley. Although he spent time in France, Greece, and Spain (whence his mother's ancestors emigrated in 1492), most of his adult life was centered in San Francisco. For an author's note he once wrote, "This poet's politics are left, his sexual orientation gay, his family Jewish.... He is short, fat, and resembles Modeste Moussorgsky in face and Gertrude Stein in body type and posture." A participant in the Free Speech movement, Melnick was a key member of G.A.W.K. (Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) and an early inspiration to the Language Poets. His masterpiece, Men in Aida, began in a reading group organized by Robert Duncan. Melnick passed away in 2022, a day before his 84th birthday.