Books

The platform, free speech and contempt

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

Edited and selected by the brilliant Leo Boix and with poems in Spanish and English from across Latin America. There’s more than 30 poets featured, covering poems about what it is to be queer in contemporary Latin America. These poems cover gender, sexuality, politics, nature, and everything in between.

Les sculptures et les films de Judith Hopf sont alimentés par des réflexions sur les relations que les êtres humains entretiennent avec la production et la technologie. Pour Énergies, sa première exposition monographique en France qui eut lieu conjointement à Paris à Bétonsalon et au Plateau, Frac Ile-de-France, l’artiste s’est concentrée sur cet élément invisible dont la quête accompagne notre quotidien et nos activités, produit par la conversion de ressources naturelles en puissance. Ce catalogue réunit des reproductions de dessins inédits, un entretien avec l’artiste et un texte critique de Tom Holert qui fait retour sur vingt années de travail.

Judith Hopf's sculptures and films are fuelled by reflections on the relationship human beings have with production and technology. For Énergies, her first solo exhibition in France, held jointly in Paris, at Bétonsalon and Plateau, Frac Ile-de-France, the artist focused on this invisible element whose quest accompanies our daily lives and activities, produced by converting natural resources into power. This catalog features reproductions of previously unpublished drawings, an interview with the artist and a critical text by Tom Holert, looking back over twenty years of work.

Textes / Texts
- François Aubart, Xavier Franceschi et Émilie Renard, "À propos d’énergie, d’amour et de chansons : conversation avec Judith Hopf"
- Tom Holert, "Changements de rythme : La méthodologie énergétique de Judith Hopf"

- François Aubart, Xavier Franceschi et Émilie Renard, "On Energy, Love, and Songs: Conversation with Judith Hopf"
- Tom Holert, "Changing Pace: Judith Hopf’s Energetic Methodology"

Traduction / Translation
Jean-François Caro
Louise Ledour

Typesetting : Olivier Lebrun

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

Casual Encountersz presents On The Rag, America’s Greatest Tabloid. Blending art and literature with sex, slime and sleaze, On The Rag emerges from LA's underground reading series Casual Encountersz to create a new media platform where the Ivory Tower and the gutter collide. On The Rag is a literary journal, gossip mag and conceptual art project all in one. Get off the apps…And get On The Rag!

A Lingua Press Numberplay, 1991.

Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidence through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and videotapes.

The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this unique correspondence in which Lorde and Parker discuss their work as writers as well as the intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. These letters are a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan.

William Rowe, the poet, and eminent translator of Latin American poetry from Vallejo to Raul Zurita & others presents his latest book of poems, Sixfingersafterwards, in six sections. The title word ‘afterwards’, which refers to a large part of the first section of poems takes inspiration from an Ayahuasca session. According to Freud, Afterwardness or Nachtraglichkeit as originally harmless memory can later be re-experienced as traumatic through the lens of new mature understanding. The Marxists view the capitalist state as inherently connected to a ‘death culture’ where the pursuit of profit overrides the human life, turning the system into a form of a vampirism that consumes the living labour. All the sections are written with a deep commitment, elaborating a painful truth in a remarkable open poetic sensitivity. Our language ravaged by ‘vampirism’ where ‘Language itself seemed to form death communiques.’  Other sections are about love, ‘when my daughter says she loves me very much.’  Or a section of Quechua poems translated by Rowe, which shed light on the extensive range of his writing and interconnectedness of his creativity. The poems in this collection leave nothing out of the traumatic pain from capitalism nor its ‘dark dark shine of money.

I dreamt of Rowe, reading these poems to the track called Walking on the ceiling, by the late Chicago blues guitarist, who played with six fingers. I renamed it to Walking the ceiling toward eternity, to honour the Sixfingersafterwards. A must-read!
- Ulli Freer

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.

One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers.

Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a metafictional work of literary speculative fiction, and a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito's older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers' petty feud. 

The Tamai and Miranda f-amilies are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada's fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. 

Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice. 

Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.

Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.

The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.

Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.

Drawn from Lou Sullivan’s meticulously kept journals, this landmark book records the life of arguably the first publicly gay trans man to medically transition.

We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay trans man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age eleven until his AIDS-related death at thirty-nine. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan’s self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.

Edited by: Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma
Introduction by: Susan Stryker

Winter Night Rabbit Worries is Yoo Heekyung’s fifth poetry collection, published in Korean in 2023. Structured as a series of stories, the book presents narrative and linguistic architectures that dissolve the opposition between those materials that construct the this and the that side of life—past and future, truth and falsehood, memory and fantasy. As readers move from one story to another, they will encounter a dizzying yet tender experience in which the boundaries between self and other unravel, and new stories begin to take shape.

“The story arrives like an overcoat emerging from a blizzard, its shoulders heavy with worries piled like snow. You shake off the snow, remove your wet coat, and pause to warm yourself by the stove. That pause is where Yoo Heekyung’s poems come into being: a moment when a kind heart stands quietly by the stove with its back turned to us.” —Kim So Yeon

Yoo Heekyung (b. 1980) is an acclaimed Korean poet, playwright, and essayist. He is the author of over ten collections of poetry and prose, including Today’s Morning Vocabulary (『오늘 아침 단어』), Photography and Poetry (『사진과 시』), and And Next Spring We Will (『이다음 봄에 우리는』). He is a playwright with the theater company dock (독) and a member of the poetry collective jaknan (작란). A recipient of Today’s Young Artist Award from the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020), Yoo lives in Seoul where he runs the poetry bookshop and project space wit n cynical.

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer in New York City. Her poems and translations appear in Best Literary Translations 2024, Poem-a-Day, Best Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. A 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and 2022–2023 Emerge—Surface—Be Fellow, Stine is the author of SMMER CRSH (Sarabande Books) and the translator of Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (Zephyr Press).

In This Household of Earthly Nature poet and poetic essayist Cody-Rose Clevidence delves into the far reaches of our planet, from homestead to information theory, from ancient history to global economics to possible futures, connecting all things; Walmart, shipping lanes, what it means to have family, friends and memories, to labor, love, to ways of knowing, and all of us together inside these vast and shifting networks. Rooted firmly in the Anthropocene, in the fragmented and information-dense internet-connected world and also in their own rural daily life, this essay-poem charts a mind grappling with what it means to be alive now, in this particular time in our planet's and our species' evolution, from the domestication of the first grain to whatever is inevitably coming next.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

A critical exploration of the values and qualities inherent in independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining "alternative" with the passing of time.

Anna Colin is programme director of the MFA Curating and co-director of the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, London. Besides Open School East, Anna worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2014–20), associate director at Bétonsalon, Paris (2011–12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007–10). She co-curated Chaleur Humaine, the 2nd Dunkirk Art & Industry Triennale (2023–24) on the relationship between energy and the arts since 1973. She holds a PhD in cultural geography and has a training in arboriculture.

Edited by Céline Chazalviel, Alice Dusapin, Sophie Orlando.
Texts by Anna Colin and Catherine Quéloz.

Clara Istlerová: A Life Among Letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). A trailblazer in her field, Istlerová was one of the few women in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. This publication introduces readers to Istlerová’s renowned book designs, particularly highlighting the analog processes she utilized to create one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Švácha, Rostislav. From Modernity to Functionalism (Odeon, 1985).

The publication features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by editor Anežka Minaříková, accompanied by work from Istlerová’s personal archive alongside discussions detailing her creative process. Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, the publication unveils the Czech design narrative of the twentieth century to English-speaking readers, highlighting Istlerová’s lasting impact and central role.

Design by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms (essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D'Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York).

A large part of the artist's role in today's professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge.

2nd edition (2025).

Often dissident, sometimes adherent, Nothing About is, in essence, indefinable because it is adaptive and fluid. Speculative or hands-on, this discipline – if we can call it that – displays all the ambivalences of our contemporary lifestyles: superficial and profound, profane and divine, present everywhere and nowhere, and often regarded as futile, even though it could nonetheless destroy the most beautiful of insides. This book brings together a variety of intellectual tools and insights – polysemic and ambiguous, bespoke and improvised, ornamental and criminal, spanning media, technology, the arts and other, often undefined fields – that analyze the impact of the discipline on contemporary design. In the end, what makes Nothing About charming is that this inside – insofar as it is still defined as such – has only the humble ambition of accompanying beings, both animate and inanimate, within their environment, like a friend who is never far away. 

Introduction by Javier Fernández Contreras. Text contributions by Daniel Zamarbide, Line Fontana & David Fagart, Valentin Dubois & Bertrand Van Dorp, Camille Bagnoud & Ahmed Belkhodja, Javier F. Contreras & Roberto Zancan, Paule Perron, Philippe Rahm, Youri Kravtchenko, Leonid Slonimskiy, Simon Husslein, Vera Sacchetti, Jan Dominik Geipel, Valentina De Luigi, Jean-Pierre Greff.

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.