Books

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

The editorial/imaginative centre of the ninth issue of Errant Journal is located in the regions that have experienced Russian imperial aggression from where it makes connections across times, geographies, and ontologies to explore the radical potential of companionship. Companionship is understood not as agreement, but as a shared responsibility across unequal histories. It means not being full without the other. While forms of imperial and colonial violence might differ in places and through times, the issue recognizes how colonial mechanisms are sustained, how they present themselves as if they were past while shapeshifting and continuing in new forms and places in the present. By bringing these contexts in relation, this issue aims to show how certain borders, biases, clichés, and power structures travel, mutate, and shape both human and non-human lives and landscapes. Ultimately, companionship is about prioritizing life and about insisting that no oppression is singular.

This issue is a concept by and co-edited with Katia Krupennikova.

Contributors: Adriana Arroyo, Keto Gorgadze, Andreas Kalkun, Chung Kai Lee, Samira Makki, Ana Mikadze, Petrică Mogoș, Fabienne Rachmadiev, Vaim Sarv, Victoria Soyan Peemot, Czyka Tumaliuan, Iryna Zamuruieva, Irene de Craen, Katia Krupennikova

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.

In the tradition of poets such as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley and Sappho, Allison Grimaldi Donahues poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.

The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words—its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech; more singing than speaking, form rather than content. Only in the dictum of the pause, the meaningful fragmentation of the breath and the staccato of the Atemwende (Paul Celan) does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression.

In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of Sound over Content! The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue (born 1984 in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, lives and works in Bologna, Italy) works in text and performance exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is author of Body to Mineral and On Endings, and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She has given performances at Short Theatre, Almanac Turin, MACRO, MAMbo, Fondazione Giuliani, Kunsthalle Bern, Hangar Biccoca, and Flip Napoli.

Mystic Transport is an exhibition project initiated through a chance encounter between two artists, Koen Theys and Gülsün Karamustafa. Both are very much intertwined with the city they live in; Brussels and Istanbul and integrate visible and invisible materials and remnants from their immediate surroundings within their practice.

Intrigued by religious parades, the hamam, war propaganda, gender issues and the entertainment industry, Theys and Karamustafa use these phenomena as starting points for their video work, installations and performances. In doing so, both artists sketch a critical portrait of the society and culture in which we live and reside, reflecting on cultural canons and differing socio-economic realities. Mystic Transport thus results in unique crossovers.

Hey culture worker! Are you feeling alone and afraid while the world burns? It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! is two books in one, created for cultural workers who want to get off the racial capitalist high-speed-train-to-nowhere and start structuring revolution through collective care.

It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! offers two routes into a fractal support network designed to shed absurd, useless forms of artworld prestige in favor of collectively producing a world organized to support caregivers.  It’s Too Late tells the true story of an exhibition about care that exposed the difference between making symbolic gestures and actually doing something. Do It Anyway! serves as a manual for The Hologram, a prism-shaped collective care protocol conceptualized by artist Cassie Thornton, inspired by the Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki in Greece, and now practiced by people all over the world.

In It’s Too Late. Do It Anyway! multiple voices weave The Hologram into the present, the past, and the future all at once, ultimately putting the story and the tools it describes into each reader’s life-wizened hands. This is not really a book;  it’s a pathway out of the tough spot we are all in right now. Anyone can make use of it, even you.

In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.

Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?

Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.

In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).

Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. Over the course of a dedicated career, his uncompromising work carved out its own patch in the territory of American experimentalism.

Lingua Press, 1976

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. It grapples with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises, while revindicating processes of nomadic becoming, transcending fixed identities, and collective emergence. While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, it has tangible implications for both individual and collective action. In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as an alternative, including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies.

Texts by Laura Tripaldi, Institute of Queer Ecologies, and Stacy Alaimo provide further food for thought, and invite readers into recondite explorations—of parasitic spaces and ghost bodies through materialist feminisms; of oak archives and the previous lives that forests can narrate to us; of acid oceans and the psychedelic trips they might afford.

Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain’s most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. 

Variations travels from Oscar Wilde’s London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester’s protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines.

Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

Nasleep neemt de protesten rondom het Gezi Park in 2013 als vertrekpunt en verkent gaandeweg wat er is overgebleven van dit historische moment waarin een andere wereld voor het grijpen leek. Het zijn gedichten die laveren tussen ritmische, conceptuele en kritische noise enerzijds en postrevolutionaire affecten anderzijds, tussen politise­ring enerzijds en onmacht en radeloosheid anderzijds.

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

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

JEB (Joan E. Biren) first introduced viewers to her photographs in 1979 when she published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, a groundbreaking celebration of women loving women. In the years that followed, JEB collaborated with poets, musicians, filmmakers, elected officials, healthcare providers, factory workers, spiritual leaders, and others who built communities and worked for political change. Her second book Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, published in 1987, depicts the spirit and energy of this movement in more than a hundred emotionally resonant photographs that take us from passionate activism to thoughtful solitude, while remarks and remembrances from each woman photographed deepen the historic record. This reissue of Making a Way adds insightful new essays by Cheryl Clarke and JD Samson, resulting in an essential document of an era whose impact continues to be felt across our society today.

First monograph dedicated to the American artist, poet, and activist John Giorno, this publication introduces some of the many ways Giorno wove poetry into all aspects of daily life—by putting words on the wall, on the performance stage, on LP vinyl records, or on the telephone, in the context of the iconic Dial-A-Poem, one of his most celebrated works. A wide range of archival documents, images, and ephemera also form an intimate portrait of Giorno as an activist, performer, Buddhist practitioner, collaborator, and friend.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous retrospective exhibition at the MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, in 2026.

Emerging from the New York downtown scene of the 1960s, John Giorno (1936–2019) developed a singular artistic voice at the crossroads of poetry, performance, painting, and political activism over the course of more than six decades. By bringing the written word off the page and into performance, technology, and visual art, Giorno consistently challenged disciplinary boundaries and advanced a radical vision of language as central to human expression. Though often positioned at the margins of multiple downtown scenes—the Beats, Andy Warhol's Factory, punk music, queer counterculture, anti-war activism—he was in fact an influential presence within all of them, operating as a conduit between coexisting cultural communities. His collaborators included Robert Rauschenberg, William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ugo Rondinone, among many others.

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide.

Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and video.

Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their existential political concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and that strive for visibility.

Contributions by Myrla Baldonado, Mayaw Biho, Nadir Bouhmouch, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Carolina Canguçu, Amaranta Cesar, Karrabing Film Collective, Rupert Cox, Nicolas Défossé, Etienne De France, Sophie Gergaud, John Gianvito, David Harper, Aurélie Journée-Duez, Blackhouse Lowe, Caroline San Martin, Laura Langa Martínez, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin, Chie Mikami, Francisco Vázquez Mota, Omar Moujane, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Perrine Poupin, Ariel Arango Prada, Beatriz Rodovalho, Roberto Romero, Jonathan Sims, Mercedes Vicente, Jamahke Welsh.

Kim Hyesoon is an iconic figure in feminist poetry. In her new collection, she depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an ‘I-do-bird-sequence’. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)
2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins offers an in-depth look at nearly two decades of artistic output by the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Retracing her practice from recent works back to her earliest experiments, the book provides an original overview of how her visual language and conceptual concerns have evolved over time.

Basma al-Sharif's films and installations navigate the unstable terrains of displacement, colonialism, and representation—often shaped by the ongoing reality of the occupation of Palestine. Through a rich selection of images and curatorial essays, the monograph highlights the layered political and cinematic frameworks within which her works are embedded.

Also included are two newly commissioned literary contributions: a fictional piece by Karim Kattan that resonates with the themes of place and estrangement, and a conversation between al-Sharif and the artist Diego Marcon, in which they reflect on shared affinities, artistic processes, and their long-standing dialogue. Blurring the personal and the political, the real and the imagined, Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins captures the complexity and urgency of al-Sharif's artistic journey.

Texts by Basma al-Sharif, Karim Kattan, Diego Marcon, et al.

Basma al-Sharif (born 1983 in Koweit) is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

A weaving draft is a kind of notation for planning and sharing woven textil structures. The threading, along the top, shows how the warp is threaded through the heddles and frames; the treadling, along the right-hand side, show the order in which the treadles of the loom are to be pressed; and the tie-up, in the upper right-hand corner, shows how each treadle interacts with the loom’ frames. The drawdown, in the lower left, shows whether the warp or weft will be on top at any particular intersection of threads—thereby providing a “preview” of the completed textile. Often a draft diagram will indicate the intended color of the warp and weft threads, and the drawdown will show the completed textile’s color patterns. In “Drafts,” Allison uses letters instead of colors, melding digital weaving with writing.

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of "vision" and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

With Foreword by adrienne maree brown

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists.

Going Out explores the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts – from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today’s manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of 51 historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives and reflections.

Essay by Elena Biserna.

Contributions by Max Neuhaus, Willem de Ridder, William Levy, Collective Actions Group, David Helbich, Janet Cardiff, Jacek Smolicki, Carolyn Chen, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Hildegard Westerkamp, Albert Mayr, Tim Ingold, Akio Suzuki, katrinem, Beatrice Ferrara & Leandro Pisano, Catherine Clover, AM Kanngieser, Gascia Ouzounian & Sarah Lappin, Ultra-red, Vivian Caccuri, Stefan Szczelkun, LIGNA, Edyta Jarząb, Oupa Sibeko, Brian Hioe, Brandon LaBelle, Adrian Piper, Andra McCartney & Sandra Gabriele, Amanda Gutiérrez, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Stephanie Springgay, Carmen Papalia, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Eppley, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Viv Corringham, BNA-BBOT, Ella Parry-Davies & Ann, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Gwenola Wagon & Stéphane Degoutin, Eleni Ikoniadou, Justin Bennett, Christina Kubisch & Christoph Cox, RYBN, Alisa Oleva, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Anna Raimondo, Libby Harward.

Who claims abstraction? What are the limits of abstraction? Are statelessness, dislocation and feelings of (un) belonging embodiments of an abstracted self that is in itself a work in progress? How could performance art—an artistic practice that places significant importance on presence and legibility of form—transgress into the realm of the abstract and the illegible in an effort to protect the artist’s likeness while shedding light on what it means to be in their body in relation to this world?

Chipo Chipaziwa’s My Mother My Home establishes itself as a query on the aspects of belonging and the artist’s own personhood that acts as the foundation of her practice. The question of where one’s personhood begins and ends within an artwork has appeared to be ever prevalent within the realm of visual art and is more relevant within the canon of performance art.

Writers: Chipo Chipaziwa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Olumoroti George

Contributing artists: Margaret Joba-Woodruff, Sophia Lapres, and David Ezra Wang
Edited by Katrina Geotjen