Arcadia Missa

It was the year that autofiction was everywhere.

All the major authors were accused of writing autofiction. You, the reader, were reading autofiction, maybe even writing autofiction yourself. The little known author HWK also was working towards his own autofiction, cycling through London, drafting, redrafting, scrapping, and scraping by, spiraling through his own mind, a geography of ambient anxiety, and a rising sea of associations and dead ends. As the tides begin to overwhelm him, HWK finds lifelines in the various stories that float past.

Possible rescuers, including Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, Mario Levrero, Jay Sherman (best known by his professional title, The Critic), and the noted animated therapist Dr. Katz call out to our narrator from the shores of literary and cultural success, will he reach them before the waters close over his head? Will HWK, dear reader, reach you?

Fail Worse is the smartest novel I’ve read in a long time, at once a scathing and hilarious critique of the limitations and conventions of autofiction as well as a moving work of personal narrative. I want to give copies of this novel to every writer I know. – Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

A brilliantly audacious and thoroughly ridiculous book – skewers its subject with a grandeur and wit it scarcely deserves… a stained glass window thrown at a pebble. – Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’.  CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself. 

As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does. 

We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.

Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

DISGRACE: Feminism and the Political Right explores the history of conservative feminism in the UK from the Edwardian period to today. Expanding on Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ research for their eponymous exhibition, the book aims to provide contextual information for the viewer, both as a resource on the history of feminism on the political right and to provide a deeper historical and political insight into the works within the exhibition.

The book centres around a timeline created by 12 etchings, with three essays covering what the artists have identified as three significant time periods, mapping the connections between the various historical manifestations of conservative feminism that lead to the current moment. An essay by Akanksha Mehta, a lecturer in Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Studies and the co-director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, considers the nature of the women’s suffrage movement, focusing on the relationship between the suffragettes and eugenics discourse. A polemical text by Lola Olufemi, a black feminist writer and organiser with the London Feminist Library, questions the women’s liberation movement and ‘sex wars’ of the mid 20th century. In the final essay – alongside etchings exploring ‘free-market feminism’, Theresa May’s ‘Women2Win’ campaign and the proliferation of transphobic rhetoric – writer, filmmaker and journalist Juliet Jacques uses Caryl Churchill’s innovative 1982 play ‘Top Girls’ to trace the trajectory of women in power, from Thatcher into the future of feminism.

FEATURING 3 ESSAYS BY:
Akanksha Mehta
Lola Olufemi
Juliet Jacques

“This book is about damage and violence, about the ramifications of channeling intensity at all costs. It is a text that is utterly compelling, that you tumble into and cannot escape from. I fucking loved it.” — Dodie Bellamy

Fail Like Fire is a carefully selected collection of twenty poems, written over the past HOWEVER MANY years, from Penny Goring’s intensely personal poetry archive.

Kathy Acker’s final published text, Eurydice in the Underworld, harnesses the Greek mythology of the heroic trip to hell; refocusing the story’s centre away from the male hero and onto the dead girl, who has been murdered by a snake.

Katabasis refers both to a journey into the underworld, and a trip to the coast. In times of climate crisis, hell – the realm of the dead, the scorching, the boiling, the rotting – is also situated at the sea, as waters heat, melt and rise.

First performed in 2019 at the ICA, London, All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long was a low-fi musical extravaganza flowing between beach and underworld, animating the animal, alien, and abject actors in our current climate apocalypse – most notably Ecco the Dolphin, who has lost their pod and must (like Eurydice, Orpheus and so on) travel deep beneath both time and space to rescue their missing and possibly dead kin.

Only a fool will now attempt to stop us girls. To halt our ecstatic singing.

A play in three acts by Linda Stupart and Carl Gent with a foreword by Isabel Waidner.

William Kherbek’s Twenty Tales from our Technofeudal Tomorrow are of course twenty tales from our technofeudal today. From the software company to the art gallery to the prison to the nature park, here is our scary, scary world as seen through the Kherbekian filter: colors pushed to full saturation, soundtrack ramped up to eleven, video played at 1.1x speed. Luckily, the terror of true realism is laced with wild insights, and the acerbic critique is mercifully cut with Kherbek’s signature raucous hilarity.

"Read this book for its political sagacity and wit, but also for its linguistic extravagance, its jubilant play on every word you thought you knew — down to the last punctuation mark. It’s the kind of funny that makes you smack yourself on the forehead. (But as always, as one character reminds, “keep one hand free for rose.”) We can only hope that some CEO does not pick this book up and take it as an instruction manual." – Elvia Wilk, author of Oval

"Kherbek’s ruthless, dystopian future bears an uncanny resemblance to present-day office politics. Twenty Terrifying Tales from Our Technofeudal Tomorrow is a book that, in true Swiftian style, is written “to vex the world rather than divert it.” – Susan Finlay, author of My Other Spruce and Maple Self

Big data (n) is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.

Deep cover, a new identity, a beached whale… a man with dreadlock implants using the alias Spanx is rooting the crusty enviro-activists out of their squats.

An ambitious young detective is tasked with creating a new kind of surveillance project to contain domestic extremists: become a domestic extremist. Under the pretence of forming a cell of environmental activists, Spanx and company go deep into the belly of the beast. Along the way, they take over the identities of dead children, the carcasses of cetaceans, and Wordsworth’s cottage in Grasmere. But then Spanx falls for a flower child called Psyche, takes on one identity too many and things really get complicated.

Arcadia Missa Publications, London, 2013; with additional editing by Felix L. Petty.

Queerdirect is an LGBTQI+ Artist support network, curatorial platform and arts programme. Initiated by Gaby Sahhar in 2017. Co-run With Lily Cheetah. Queerdirect hold regular events and curate exhibitions around London and provide queer artists with a platform and support. Queerdirect is the UK’s first contemporary arts platform and project space dedicated to queer arts.

This is the first edition, September 2019.
A5 perfect bound publication, 81 pp., published by Queerdirect & Camp Books and featuring 31 LGBTQIA+ artists working in and around London.

Winter 2019. SLEEP.

Contributions by: NAVILD ACOSTA, CLAY AD, MANDISA APENA, KHAIRANI BAROKKA, LINDA BESNER, LEAH CLEMENTS, PENNY GORING, LEWIS HAMMOND, ELAINE KAHN, GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN, LIV MENDEZ, BELLA MILROY, EILEEN MYLES, PRECIOUS OKOYOMON, LAUREN O’NEILL, RUTH PILSTON, HANNAH QUINLAN & ROSIE HASTINGS, FANNIE SOSA, ROMILY ALICE WALDEN, IAN WOOLDRIDGE and ANNA ZETT

Recipes for you: A vegan and gluten free recipe and story book with additional life skills is a new cookbook and survival guide by artist Holly White. Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories.

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).

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.

How is survivalism mediated in contemporary culture? . . . For this issue we asked the semi-speculative question: is it possible that survivalism is our only remaining ideological position. This was in part to see how we might be able to understand a hyper, hysterical, hyperbolic moment of cultural production as either indicative of, or (more hopefully) creating the momentum for an escape from, an age of contemporary ‘cynical reason’.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Harry Burke (eds).

With the fourth issue of How to Sleep Faster we asked our contributors four interconnected questions: What now is a radicalised, networked, subjectivity? How can we build a commons through and from this subjectivity? Is it self-critical in its understanding of the ‘we’ it talks for? And lastly, how do, and how must, these subjectivities engage with globalised material realities?

At root, the exploration of these ideas — as connected themselves – is about a critique of readings of the network through Multitude. We are looking to think beyond immanence, and look to something else, by asking what ‘something else’ is, or could be.

Contributors: Megan Kelly Rooney, Eleanor Weber, William Kherbek, Hannah Black, Harry Sanderson, Georgina Miller, Paul Kneale, Candice Jacobs, Aimee Heinemann, Ann Hirsch, Harry Burke, Rosa Aiello, John Bloomfield, Maja Malou Lyse (Boothbitch), Holly White, Martina Miholic, Felix Petty, Huw Lemmey, Julian Molina, Rachel Schofield Owen, Charlie Woolley, Jesse Darling, KERNEL.

Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark (eds).

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)

“How can we fuck in a way that doesn’t support a patriarchal prism and standard for sex to reflect capitalist relations? Can sex be a site for identity politics, after we are imbued with the lore and failure of the sexual ‘revolution’?”

the body in pain