rile* reading room

Simone White

«The orb begins to break apart, or peel away. I begin to apprehend the thing that I am inside; I see us fall away from each other and the ligature of individuated desire becomes perceptible. The violence of the bind makes possible the path toward breaking. It is the beautiful impossibility of not feeling pleasure in company that degrades and insults us, the degradation's own fundamental energy, which is matter, thus neither this nor that, which propells it away.»

e-flux (2019, 3p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Gut Feminism

Elizabeth A. Wilson

«Gut Feminism is not an argument for the gut over the brain, for drugs instead of talk, for biology but not culture; rather, it is an exploration of the remarkable intra-actions of melancholic and pharmaceutical events in the human body.»

DUKE Press (2015, 20p)

The Complaining Body, Manual 3

Manual Labours

The Manual asks: what are the physical impacts on the body when complaining, receiving complaints and when you feel unable to complain? The emotional labour involved in listening to and managing complaints; the social and cultural conditions of complaining and the affect of not complaining all have repercussions on the body as a site of resistance, absorption and expulsion.

Cultural Democracy editions (2017, 40p)

Data Workers

Algolit

Companies create artificial intelligence (AI) systems to serve, entertain, record and learn about humans. The work of these machinic entities is usually hidden behind interfaces and patents. In the exhibition, algorithmic storytellers left their invisible underworld to become interlocutors. The data workers operate in different collectives. Each collective represents a stage in the design process of a machine learning model: there are the Writers, the Cleaners, the Informants, the Readers, the Learners and the Oracles. The boundaries between these collectives are not fixed; they are porous and permeable. At times, Oracles are also Writers. At other times Readers are also Oracles. Robots voice experimental literature, while algorithmic models read data, turn words into numbers, make calculations that define patterns and are able to endlessly process new texts ever after.

Constant vzw (2019, 52p)

Widazhad

Meehan Crist

«Perhaps the most urgent question is one we will never be done asking: for what utopia are we to pine? What so many of us yearn for is to speak the language of our future liberated selves. And while visions of what “we” experience and “we” desire will not always align, exploring those visions for clues to future liberation can suggest shared loci for something like hope.»

Serving Library (2018, 13p)

Questionnaire to Oneself

Audre Lorde

«What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, for what do you not have words, yet?] What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary] What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.] If we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth? [So, answer this today. And every day.]»

Divya Victor (2016, 1p)

The Endurance

Sina Queyras

«On board one day is refashioned out of the next. A conversation becomes a clothesline, Frozen diapers dipped in the toaster, Even death becomes an outfit, a lens, a tree, The hours before daylight are a vague Memory of ice calving, hours we enumerate Like a rosary, like a favourite day we can lick And lick, like a cat with its back legs outstretched»

Belladonna (2015, 12p)

Notes on The School for Temporary Liveness Vol. 1

School For Temporary Liveness Team

«This publication gathers reflections on and responses to the School for Temporary Liveness, a week-long event that brought performances, workshops, talks, conversations, and new formats for study together within the poetic frame of a school. All who participated were invited to consider themselves students of the school, and to move through several zones of encounter — the Classroom, the Library, Study Hall, and Night School — each of which engaged different modes of viewing and participation, thereby generating radically different choreographies of assembly for the practice of study.»

Self-Published (2019, 33p)

Contributed by: STFL

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

Larry Mitchell

«I have been held by my friends, my very own faggots, who after all this time still let me cry and stare and slobber and scream and stay silent. I have come undone, and this has kept me alive. The faggots have helped me believe that if we are to ever make it to that next revolution it will be through becoming undone, an undoing that touches ourselves and touches each other and all the brokenness we are.»

Night Boat Books (2019, 152p)

Contributed by: Morgan Bassichis

This Container Edition 04

Chloe Chignell, Maia Means and Ellen Söderhult

July 2017 — This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Self-Published (2017, 38p)

Most People Prefer Lies, Interjection Calendar

Sarah Smith

«It’ll cost you. And remember, you already spent too much on me in those three years. You will regret it for the rest of your life. All those phone calls I keep meaning to make. But it’s been seven years now since I saw those big blue eyes. And shit. I should stop. Before I say too much. Oi, this concentration playlist you made really does bang baby. The notes in front of this desk line up. Spell out. I can’t get the taste of you out of my mouth. It’s all so sexy until it gets too heavy. Glimmer of hope. I’m so tired of playing nice. The banality of asking permission. I disguise it in smiles for you. And like I’ve always said. Most people prefer lies.»

Montez Press (2020, 6p)

What The Sands Remember

Vanessa Agard-Jones

«Sand emerges as a compelling metaphor here, as a repository from which we might read traces of gender and sexual alterity on the landscape. Ever in motion, yet connected to particular places, sand both holds geological memories in its elemental structure and calls forth referential memories through its color, feel between the fingers, and quality of grain. Today’s sands are yesterday’s mountains, coral reefs, and outcroppings of stone. Each grain possesses a geological lineage that links sand to a place and to its history, and each grain also carries a symbolic association that indexes that history as well.»

DUKE Press (2012, 22p)

Contributed by: Rebecca Schneider

Black Visuality and The Practice of Refusal

Tina Campt

What constitutes a practice of refusal? This article engages the practice of refusal collaboratively articulated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, a group founded three years ago by Peggy Phelan and Saidiya Hartman. It does so by unpacking a series of keywords that, They argue, define the contours of an emergent black visuality that itself constitutes a practice of refusal as enacted by two contemporary artists who are creating radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself.

Women and Performance (2019, 14p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Day

Fred Moten

«Slave narrative isn’t the genre in which one gives an account of slavery and oneself; slave narrative is the disappearance of oneself and the diffusion of slavery in the giving, which can’t be accounted for, of the account.»

Belladonna (2017, 15p)

No Sleep

Barbara Baracks

«I live on a time delay while I separate the real threats from false alarms, caught--or rather, fascinated-by the sheer absurdity, the improbability, of the situation and the presumptions behind it.»

Tuumba Press (1977, 13p)

The Walk of Multiplicity, Notes of Feminism 4

Trinh T. Minh-Ha

«It is in this space of an elsewhere within here—that is, a between that breaks with a here and a there and with binary oppositional practice—that I would situate my work. Art could be the force that enables change and keeps history alive, while the poetics of the creative everyday could be both a dimension of political consciousness and a transformative mode of history.»

Feminist Art Coalition (2019, 8p)

Learning from the Virus

Paul B. Preciado

«We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation. We must operate a critical reappropriation of biopolitical techniques and their pharmacopornographic devices. [...] We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. [...] Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. »

ArtForum (2020, 22p)

Contributed by: SFTL

List Of Actual Deaths

UNITED

List of 36 570 documented deaths of refugees and migrants due to the restrictive policies of "Fortress Europe" Documentation by UNITED as of 1 April 2019

UNITED (2019, 57p)

Contributed by: Arkadi Zaides

Arkansas

Fred Moten

«I come up hard, baby new edge come up new up hard, baby nobody taught up hard I come up hard, baby. I come»

Pressed Wafer Books (2000, 46p)

Choreography - Koreografi 18

Solveig Styve Holte, Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness and Venke Marie Sortland (eds)

The initiative behind CHOREOGRAPHY stems from an interest in the language that artists themselves can develop. The writers are in different stages in their approach. Yet they are united in their attempt to find a productive way to relate to language, so that language can be used for what they need in their artistic carriers.

Self-Published (2018, 89p)

Presence in Absentia

Amelia Jones

«I read body art performances as enacting the dispersed, multiplied, specific subjectivities of the late capitalist, postcolonial, postmodern era: subjectivities that are acknowledged to exist always already in relation to the world of other objects and subjects; subjectivities that are always already intersubjective as well as interobjective. To the point, I insist that it is precisely the relationship of these bodies/subjects to documentation (or, more specifically, to re-presentation) that most profoundly points to the dislocation of the fantasy of the fixed, normative, centered modernist subject and thus most dramatically provides a radical challenge to the masculinism, racism, colonialism, classism, and heterosexism built into this fantasy.»

Art Journal (1977, 8p)

Contributed by: Wilmer Wilson IV

March is for Marches

→ Morgan Bassichis and Ethan Philbrick

A yearlong musical experiment in improvisation and friendship.

Triple Canopy (2019, external link)

Contributed by: Morgan Bassichis

The Innocent Question

Anne Boyer

«Some of us write because there are problems to be solved. Sometimes there are specific, smaller problems. A friend who has a job as a telephone transcriptionist for people who can’t hear has had to face the problem of what to do when one party he is transcribing has sobbed. (He puts the sobs in parentheses.) This is the problem of what-to-do-with-the-information-that-is-feeling.»

Ahsahta press (2015, 17p)

Amphibious Maidens

L. Parisi S. Livingstone A. Greenspan

«She starts again at zero her body sex. a zero which appears as nothing but which she will carry in her hand as cipher. Open the so called body and spread out all its surfaces: cut open the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, and its great velvety planes... Fold the body inside out.»

CCRU (2012, 4p)

Bodies to Come, Notes on Feminisms

Peggy Phelan

«The image of the body may or may not be aligned with the psychic or biochemical composition of the body. To “cut” into these aspects of embodiment is to do rather more than change the surface image of the body»

Feminist Art Coalition (2019, 7p)

This Container Edition 05

Chloe Chignell, Maia Means and Ellen Söderhult

Dec 2017 — This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Self-Published (2017, 51p)

Gaps and Their Consequences, The Story of My Accident is Ours

Rachel Levitsky

«It was in my thinking about our names that I began to tell this story. It therefore follows to reason that thinking about names is the one true origin of my accident. But I must account for the fact that my accident, which may have originated when it occured to me that I did not know my name nor the name of any of us, came after the events of this story, which begins to be written when I begin to think this way about our names.»

FuturePoem (2016, 7p)

Vaginal Orgasm as a Mass Hysterial

Ti-Grace Atkinson

«I suppose we all have put aside the speeches we prepared before last night. In the face of Martin Luther King's death one must tell the truth as plain as one can.»

Self-Published (1968, 3p)

Landscape Dramaturgy

Anna Vujanovic

«The recognition of perspective as – a still predominant – model of thinking the world, associated both with individualism and anthropocentrism, as well as experiments in creating the spaces of cognition, affection, and sensation configured by shared views are for me the most important contribution landscape dramaturgy brings both to the contemporary performing arts and a wider social imaginary.»

Online Only (2017, 13p)

Furies Magazine #1

Furies

The Furies Collective was a communal lesbian group in Washington, D.C. that was established in the summer of 1971. The group intended to give a voice to lesbian separatism through this newspaper, The Furies.

The Furies Collective (1972, 16p)

Writing as Architecture: Performing Reality Until Reality Complies

Raafat Majzoub

All our memories come from the same place. This text is the fabric of two texts, woven into each other in a conversational pattern. These two texts, one composed from extracts of a novel (The Perfumed Garden) and the other written as an explicatory text for the purpose of this piece, are conversing with each other, sometimes delicately, sometimes discrepantly. They can be read both together and separately.

AntiAtlas Journal (2017, 24p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Taking up Instructions for Becoming

Rebecca Schneider

«Gesture puts history in motion. Gesture extends iteration, jumping from one body to another, tracing one time in another time, one space in another space.»

Methuen Drama (2020, 15p)

Contributed by: Rebecca Schneider

Duration

Andre Lepecki

«As soon as there are no metrics, as soon as there is no measure, as soon as there are no economies of (im)patience and expectations, as soon as there are no accounting subjects—then we fnd duration doing its heterogeneously singular acts. This doing is the undoing of a measured time that above all controls, mediates, and imprisons both subjects and things as objects of measure.»

In Terms of Performance (2016, 3p)

Contributed by: Wilmer Wilson IV

Choreography - Koreografi 16

Solveig Styve Holte, Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness and Runa Borch Skolseg (eds)

This magazine is dedicated to Choreography and consists of texts from artists within the Nordic field of dance and choreography. The magazine wishes to build a rich and complex understanding of what choreography is and can be.

Self-Published (2016, 90p)

To the (heart) Horse

Aracelis Girmay

«God knows. Should have just set you loose. You were not mine or mine to give.»

Curbstone (2007, 1p)

Contributed by: Wilmer Wilson IV

A Cry and then A Choir

Deborah Birch

«It continues. It was a bcc: email. What I’m trying to say is this, that it is always you, always me, and we are always translating and mistranslating and fantasising and multiplying. It’s only more specific once the instant has been extended. Because we re-enter the world and want to tell a story. I want to tell you a story about us.»

Self-Published (2019, 4p)

Radical feminism

Ti-Grace Atkinson

«Considering that the last massing of discontent among women continued some 70 years (1850-1920) and spread the world and that the recent accumulation of grievances began some three years ago here in America the lack of a structural understanding of the problem is at first sight incomprehensible.»

Self-Published (1969, 8p)

Écriture trans-féminine?

Juliet Jacques

«I should add here that given the infinitude of gender expressions, and the extent to which they have sometimes conflicted with each other, we cannot speak of a homogenous ‘trans’ group. These positions grew, in part, out of what has become known as a second wave of écriture trans: writers discussing their gender dysphoria – the sense of their identity not matching the one assigned at birth – and how it could be conveyed.»

Mal Journal (2018, 10p)

Metro Boomin Want Some More Nigga

Simone White

«I quit, now, capitulation to the legend of the Music as a superior space for investigating, as digging, knowledge of freedom. Let the work of sociological description and literary critical “reading” continue elsewhere, and far be it from me. Professional habits of criticism and thought cannot account at all for elements of black music that have no form that has not already been constitutive of black legibility. What if we were to say, This sound is unrecognizable to me; I don’t know what this black sound is; I don’t know what it wants; I don’t know whether it is saying what it says it is saying. What if I gave it that much respect?»

Belladonna (2017, 16p)

Untitled, Woman on Ground

Renee Gladman

«I told you that if you moved here you would begin to see the deformity in everybody, that you yourself would become deformed. I said "it will be more than the man with mangled toes sitting there, drunk, asleep, with his mouth open; it will manifest even in the beautiful, even the in-between.»

Belladonna (2004, 9p)

Geontologies: The Concept and its Territories

Elizabeth Povinelli

«As I am hoping will become clear, Capitalism has a unique relation to the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus insofar as Capitalism sees all things as having the potential to create profit; that is, nothing is inherently inert, everything is vital from the point of view of capitalization, and anything can become something more with the right innovative angle.»

e-flux (2017, 11p)

Contributed by: SFTL

To Quarantine from Quaratine

Catherine Malabou

«This, once again, is not out of any individualism but because I think on the contrary that an epochè, a suspension, a bracketing of sociality, is sometimes the only access to alterity, a way to feel close to all the isolated people on Earth.»

Critical Inquiry (2020, 3p)

Only Shallow, Interjection Calendar

Jasmine Gibson

«The ache of debris settling against teeth i am awake and we are all going to work in some way or another i love love i love vengance and know the limits of said love»

Montez Press (2020, 8p)

The Plot of Her Undoing, Notes on Feminism 2

Saidiya Hartman

«The plot of her undoing begins with the man, the sovereign, the subject, the self-possessed, the able-bodied, the reasonable, the gendered, the neurotypical, it begins with the vertical hierarchy of life, with the uneven distribution of death, with the announcement “I think” and “I am” and “I own” and “I will,” with the possessive my and mine, with therefore and hereafter...»

Feminist Art Coalition (2019, 7p)

Building as a Body, Manual 4

Manual Labours

Building as Body looks into the ways in which buildings and bodies are fluid ecosystems which affect each other, mapping how the circulatory, digestive and social reproductive systems operate in the cultural institution. What symptoms does this building suffer with? What ways can we diagnose and challenge the conditions that perpetuate them?

Cultural Democracy editions (2018, 94p)

Walking to School Through a Camp: A Short Tale of Infrastructure

Irit Rogoff

«What if we were to conceive of attention as infrastructure, as something that makes flow and delivery possible? Could it be not what was found out about Mauthausen, but the performance of attention to it that broke through people’s unease? Perhaps one of the ways into this huge problematic is to write small stories of infrastructure —as attention, as affect, as technological compulsion.»

e-flux (2020, 10p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Blue Carbon, Intertidal

→ Holly Childs and JG Biberkopf

«Blue Carbon, Intertidal is a poem, longer than the excerpt used in this video, that iterates like tides. Awareness that the edges will always change, iterating almost imperceptibly over a scale of days, while shifting dramatically over larger timescales.»

The Good Neighbour and Runway Journal (2019, external link)

Ethical Encounters: The other, others and strangers

Sara Ahmed

«The other, then, the one whom I may not know, is always my neighbour, living by my side, living ‘with’ me. The other is the ‘stranger neighbour’: she is distant in the sense that I cannot assume community or commonality with her, and yet she is close by, so that she will haunt me, stay with me, as a reminder of the unassimilable in my life, or that which cannot be assimilated into the ‘my’ of ‘my life’. The pain of the other’s nearness suggests that encountering the other opens the self to the world, an opening that touches the self, makes it feel: the self becomes an opening, a boundless space of torment, the tiredness of being by the other, and of being with and for that which is not yet.»

Psychology Press (2000, 24p)

Performing The Feed

Paul Soulellis

«Looking for the origins of the post—where do we get this gesture, the word, its meaning? I don’t have any conclusive evidence, but the post appears to have a long trajectory that points towards something very basic and physical—an actual wooden post.»

The Cybernetic Conference (2017, 14p)

Contributed by: Wilmer Wilson IV

The Future Body at Work

Frida Sandstrom

«As functionaries of global political and production systems, we must be attentive to how the present frames of living shape us. Dancing makes space for such shaping to be recognized and recomposed. Beyond oppressive modelling that attempts to give space to all seemingly “absent” bodies, we dissent, intervene, and revolt. We dance to join this revolution.»

e-flux (2019, 13p)

A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan

Suzette Haden Elgin

Láadan is a language constructed by a woman, for women, for the specific purpose of expressing the perceptions of women. This grammar and dictionary are intended to introduce you to the language and give you an opportunity to see if it is of interest to you or could be useful to you.

Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction Inc. (1988, 95p)

Iphigenia

Alice Notely

«who dares me out turn the profits (poems) from bruning but am the vicitim. I counsel you to listen for irrational connection (undergrowth).»

Belladonna (2002, 14p)

Can't Is Night

Leslie Scalapino

«— woman saying our language is to reverse night — is 'for' that — not producing — night uncontrolled is occurance in sturcture unseen at all not producing at all — one's seeing —»

Belladonna (2003, 14p)

The Undercommons - Fugitive Planning and Black Study

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

Minor Compositions (2013, 174p)

This Container Edition 07

Chloe Chignell and Maia Means

May 2019 — This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Self-Published (2019, 93p)

This Container Edition 08

Chloe Chignell, Maia Means and Stefan Govaart

May 2020 — This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Self-Published (2020, 79p)

The Commons Infrastructures for troubling

Lauren Berlant

«Here the infrastructure of the social emerges within, and takes on the dynamics of, an open plan. But it is not a flat plane, because language is a bumpy surface, a hard bed for bodies and the histories they shape, and because they understand that they want to be like what they are not yet like.»

Sage PUB (2016, 27p)

Ferrara Deux

Ivan Cheng

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information. ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

Self-Published (2020, 14p)

Faithful Mother Tongue We Have Been Serving You

Olivia Douglass

«A washing line runs through the allotments where the neighbourhoods bean sprouts and tomatoes grow the vines of green are...»

Self-Published (2019, 1p)

Oral History, Interjection Calendar

Georgia Anderson

«Act of Feverish Transcription. and also, do you want to get off with each other sometime?»

Montez Press (2017, 10p)

A Series of Portraits Amongst Whiteness

Olivia Douglass

«whiteness is kept in a pocket and never passed to the table to be looked at ask someone where their whiteness is they might point to their pocket as if being forced»

Self-Published (2019, 6p)

School for Temporary Liveness Vol.2 Glossary

Dixon Lee

A glossary in 8 terms and 4 images.

Self-Published (2020, 9p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Performer, Audience, Mirror: Cinema, Theatre and the Idea of the Live

Ian White

«The body is a false promise. To be lifelike is not to live. Or, live-ness (liveness) is not lifelikeness. Just because somebody is actually there, a body on a stage is no more of a guarantee that what we are seeing is categorically live than an emotion portrayed by an actor on the screen is an indication that something was actually felt, even though we might think they are these things.»

Intellect Books (2012, 16p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Rat and Roaches

Claudia Pagès

«If there’s anything I can do right, it’s calculating, dividing finances and distributing them between what I think I want and what I get. The daily budget is €3.50, even with Anna’s visits: in the morning, donuts; in the afternoon, Xibeca beer. Anna also worries but without visible strategy or words; she has in- ternal distress. Our silent deal is to be two and bring more flavors and smaller quantities of each to our meals.»

Yaby + Jupiter Woods (2020, 16p)

Notes on the Underside of Visibility, Propositions for Non-Fascist Living

Denise Ferreira da Silva

«The point is then to assemble strategies for knowing the world differently. But this is not just for the sake of knowing. Knowing the world differently, knowing the world otherwise, is both the precondition and the outcome of the end of the world, that is to say, decolonization which is the return of the total value extracted from native territories and expropriated from slave bodies.»

MIT (2019, 10p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Going Off, Notes on Feminisms

Jack Halberstam

«Once upon a time we went off, we went off together, we made off, we made off together, we stayed off, we stayed off together, we were off. Going on meant always staying on, never going off, never being off, on and on and on and on.»

Feminist Art Coalition (2019, 5p)

Or, On Being the Other Woman

Simone White

«What is the relation between pleading and womanhood? Is how the problem came to me in the night caution has set in regarding language proposals, compositional possibilities, attunement to deep activities of the mind is still hot I should not speak wantonly even freely of my theory of externalization nor forgot i am the subject of opinions and whispers; that I have given up total privacy in writing about the real conditions of my life.»

e-flux (2018, 2p)

Contributed by: SFTL

This Container Edition 06

Chloe Chignell and Maia Means

July 2018 — This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Self-Published (2018, 56p)

Desire / Love

Lauren Berlant

«There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.»

Dead Letter Office (2012, 28p)

Plantocracy or Communism, Propositions for Non-Fascist Living

Fred Moten & Stefano Harney

«The undercommons is the refusal of the interpersonal— and, by extension, the international—upon which politics in built. To be undercommon is to live incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion, which acknowledges and insists upon the inoperative condition of the individual and nation.»

MIT (2019, 14p)

Contributed by: SFTL

No More Erasers

Chloe Chignell

«you can take it from my hand peel the name from these fingers (too often touched) they’re stuck.»

Self-Published (2018, 3p)

Being Open

Joaquim Moreno

«To engage and participate in academic dialogue requires listening as well as speaking, and only a very active listening—dwelling carefully in and on the thoughts of others—can lead to the emergence of new voices, new actors, new visions, and new vectors. Many important ideas are in fact better communicated to the solitude of radio listeners than to an auditorium. Close attention to student experience, to bottom-up histories, to people’s histories, is essential for the voices which normally do not take up words in the lecture hall to start a dialogue, a conversation.»

e-flux (2020, 8p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Your Corner of the World

→ Emilio Rojas with Rebecca Schneider

Rebecca Schneider, professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies in conversation with multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas. Schneider and Rojas share their practice and discuss what it means to be an artist creating work during the time of COVID-19.

Brown Arts Initiative (2020, external link)

Contributed by: Rebecca Schneider

The Ethics of Joy, POSTHUMAN Glossary

Rosi Braidotti

«A joyful ethics rests on an enlarged sense of a vital interconnection with a multitude of (human and non-human) others by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism and anthropocentrism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other.»

Bloomsbury (2018, 4p)

The World is Unknown

→ Carolyn Lazard

An essay on belief, biomedicine, and the pursuit of alternative modes of care. I’ve come to understand that the enemy of health is neither pharmaceuticals nor snake oil, but dogma. The body is too unwieldy to fit within the schema of authoritative interpretation.

Triple Canopy (2019, external link)

Contributed by: SFTL

The Uses of The Erotic

Audre Lorde

«The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. [...] Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.»

Sage Pub (1978, 5p)

Contributed by: SFTL

Postscripts

Jalal Toufic

«In lieu—of the Ruin»

Roma Publishing (2020, 83p)

The Madmanifest

Loucka Fiagan

«Striking the flu hit defacto review / view / stick in deep poor soul / lact detroy / core so sit set seen sex hore so sort / stray wack concert sir / turn turn masses graphic / end of result toast all folk cut coal kit keen kin talk / soft as sulf riddim hat / nachd a nack a mechanis hat can handle wit dat / resat to soon hat to proove fool loot»

Self-Published (2020, 12p)

The Land of Open Graves

Jason De León

«It’s funny how memory works. I made a thousand mental notes of the scene—and wrote a good many of them down soon after the event—but only a couple of years later they now seem to be forgotten, buried, reduced to background noise. After spending just a few weeks on the US-Mexico border hanging out with the desperate people looking to breach America’s immigration defenses, I quickly learned that death, violence, and suffering are par for the course. It all started to blur together. Disturbing images lost their edge. As an observer, you grow accustomed to seeing strangers cry at the drop of a hat. Tears no longer had the impact they once did.»

University of California Press (2015, 378p)

Contributed by: Arkadi Zaides

girls from my class, Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl

Jennifer Wong

«Then the day that first man i thought the world of, pushed me down and said i'd love to do it with you on the floor. If you keep digging, sooner or later you might reach a volcano.»

Bitter Melon (2019, 1p)