rile*books

A long conversation about the work and life of Portuguese artist Ana Jotta, accompanied by 60 previously unpublished photographs of her homes (in Brazil, Morocco, and Zanzibar) and her years in theater in the late 1970s.

“Peau d’Ana” is a conversation with the Portuguese artist Ana Jotta (1946), conducted in January 2024 by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, and Baptiste Pinteaux in the Lisbon apartment that Ana has occupied for over forty years. Through the history of both this unique place and the various other homes in which she has lived — Tangier, Madeira, Brazil, and the Portuguese countryside — Ana Jotta mischievously and playfully invites us to revisit fragments of her life. She discusses her childhood, her work as an actress and set designer, her first exhibitions in the mid-1980s, and her life in the studio. She talks about the importance of pleasure and frustration, her love of painting and literature, and the role of the irrational in her work. She shares her dislike of families, her friendships with artists and other animals, and the detours necessary for finding, and preserving, the energy essential for work… and for sleep. She disarms with the precision of her words, which describe a solitary, demanding, and profoundly vivid existence where mediocrity has no place. The interview, published in French and English, is accompanied by some sixty previously unpublished photographs and documents.

A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.

What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

Metamorphoses springs from Ovid's epic poem to explore the slipperiness of identity, its propensity for change and transience. In poems that shift registers from travelogue to elegy, from nature documentary to a simple record of the realities of daily life, Evan Kennedy focuses on transformation, personal and collective, in an empire in decline, in a world transfigured by ecological upheaval.

With a range of reference from Roman household Gods to San Francisco poetic titans to musical celebrities like Madonna and Bob Dylan, Metamorphoses confronts change as an inevitable molecular process.

Two Intersecting Loops of Silence is a 10-inch experimental vinyl that turns silence into rhythm and time into matter. Side A features two silent grooves that create a mechanical ticking when played, while Side B animates a clock-like etched drawing as the record spins. Numbered edition of 200 with hand-printed, unique etching covers. Each copy a one-of-a-kind artwork.

In 2021, Hend Elbalouty started researching the relation between art and social class in Egypt and created a performance inspired by the local street dance and music in Egypt (Mahraganat). In her artistic work, Hend strives to produce and participate in socially aware dance pieces, constantly exploring the role of Art as a tool to empower the individual and bring out those neglected modes of expression. With her recent publication "Mahraganat Dance in Egypt: Between Acceptance & Rejection", she now continues this exploration within the form of an artist's book.

Hend Elbalouty (EGP/DE) is a choreographer, performer and author, based in Cologne. She holds a MA in Performing Arts from Academy of Media Arts Cologne, a BA in production design from institute of cinema studies in Egypt and 3 years degree in contemporary dance from Cairo Contemporary Dance Center. In recent years, Hend was interested in the challenge of using Arabic language – in Germany – as an artistic tool. This approach often challenged the perception of Arabic language in the western art world, and was the core of many projects in the last three years such as for the video exhibition “FrauenGold'in Hamburg, the dance performance “The Kitchen” in Cologne, or “Absence”, a group exhibition at Coculture Art space, Berlin, as well as the video installation “hell vol.1” in Cologne.

In 2022 Hend was awarded the “Kunstpreis der FREUNDE der KHM 2021”, which honors outstanding artistic achievements by KHM diploma students and graduates.

Practicing Dying is a literary anti-memoir documenting life in a Zen Buddhist monastery in rural France where the protagonist, a woman in her late twenties, attempts to overcome chronic drug addiction and mental illness. 

Broken and severely unwell, our protagonist arrives at the monastery from London: starving, drug-addicted and disillusioned, having exhausted every conventional treatment route available to her. The book examines how, habituated to a life of benefits assessments, petty-crime and sex work, she struggles to adjust to the rules, discipline and religious life of the monastery—at times to devastating and comedic effect. 

As the story unfolds, she reflects on her addictions and past experiences, raising critical questions about what it means to be "an addict" and why there may be vested corporate and societal interests in maintaining a narrow, individualistic understanding of addiction. 

Anarchic and provocative, tender and self-deprecating, Practicing Dying differs from other contemporary memoirs in the genre of addiction-recovery by simultaneously challenging the dominant narratives surrounding mental health while proposing an alternative approach to treating the “sickness of self” from which we all increasingly suffer. 

‘Practicing Dying is brilliant, rewarding and difficult. Northall offers the most brazen and shocking account of addiction I’ve ever read. Committing herself to the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, she eventually finds a way out, but only on the most rambling, circuitious path. Her account of addiction and loss, displacement and grief is profound and it proves that nothing is ever one thing.’ — Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent The Day Together

Charlotte Northall is a London-based writer. Her debut, Practicing Dying, blends autobiography and cultural criticism to explore addiction, capitalism, and spiritual practice. She works with rough sleepers, supporting those living with addiction and complex mental health needs.

In You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More, Serubiri Moses offers an intimate and personal study of the lives and loves of pop star Freddy Mercury, combining a detailed epigraphy on the duplicitous nature of Mercury's origins, sexuality, and artistic talent with his own delicate memoir as a poet. Through this series of interlocked poems, yet again Moses lures us into an atmosphere both sensual and scholarly that echoes well past its last verse.

With ardor and grace, Serubiri Moses traverses a catalogue of pop music, visual art, and cultural history to bring his readers to a state of openness — to love, to art, and the freewill of ecstatic experience. Moses’s writing forefronts pleasure as a gateway for deeper critical inquiry, braiding personal memory and epigraphic excursions into sex, stardom, and poetry, reminding us in this journey that "pleasure almost happens without us knowing."
— Tausif Noor

Serubiri Moses, Ugandan curator and author, lives in New York City. He serves as a part-time faculty member at Hunter CUNY, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held faculty positions at New York University, and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Chazen Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL), and University of the Arts Helsinki (FL). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. He has curated solo presentations of Carl E. Hazlewood, Reza Aramesh, and is working on a retrospective of Taryn Simon. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal and his short stories have appeared in print in Ursula, and online in Lolwe. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). He is the author of the poetry collection THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK (2023; Pântano Books).

New Ancient Words is the first translation of Ellen Lima Wassu's poetry into English. A trilingual edition between her native Tupi indigenous language of the land of Pindorama, now Brazil, Portuguese, and English, this collection offers a wider readership her resistant yet intimate poetry, which flows seamlessly between her relational woes, a decolonial voice, and an animated playfulness with words and imagery. In her poems, history is an unstable landscape, where the personal, the mythical, and the natural are ever entwined and ever shifting in meaning.

Ellen Lima Wassu is a multiartist, freshwater fish, perplexed human, apartment gardener, and more beast than person. Born in Rio de Janeiro, she is Indigenous to the Wassu Cocal people (Alagoas, Brazil) and currently lives in Portugal, where she is pursuing a PhD, developing artistic practices, teaching courses, giving lectures, and working as an activist. In addition to contributing to literary magazines and anthologies, she has published ybykûatiara um livro de terra (Urutau, 2023) and ixé ygara voltando pra ’y’kûá (Urutau, 2021). Her practice weaves together art, poetry, performance, activism, critique, counter-colonial studies, essayistic writing, good encounters, river baths, listening sessions, and conversations with flowers.

Translation by Isadora Neves Marques and Alice dos Reis, revised by Marta Espiridião

When conventional language does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own. Slang expresses words and feelings that break down boundaries. It is a form of protest and fills in the gaps.

The Queer Arab Glossary is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

With beautiful, witty illustrations, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to pervasive myths and stereotypes around sexuality and an invitation to take a journey into queerness throughout the Arab world.

Contributors include Saqer Almarri, Nisrine Chaer, Sophie Chamas, Rana Issa, Adam HajYahia, Suneela Mubayi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Hamed Sinno and Abdellah Taïa.

The Queer Arab Glossary was made possible with the generous support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC, Mophradat, Bashar Assaf and Mohammed Fakhro.

Foreword by Rabih Alameddine

Multilayered lyric poems that resist systems of power and foster intimacy. 

An inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.

The eleventh issue of Robida magazine, is collection of essays, photographic explorations, visual narratives, art projects, and poetic texts all centered on the orchard as landscape and fruit trees as powerful metaphors and living archives of stories and memories.

Robida is a situated, multilingual cultural magazine published by Robida collective. Each issue explores a topic connected and generated by Topolò/Topolove, the village on the border between Italy and Slovenia where the collective is based.
The chosen topic is thrown into the world and interpreted by people who have never been to Topolò. What people send back after the open call is not only a contribution to the exploration of a defined theme but also a new interpretational tool to explore the collective’s relation to Topolò.

CONTRIBUTORS
Alessandra Saviotti, Alja Piry, Aljaž Škrlep, Alessandra Faccini, Anastasia Kolas, Andrea Martinelli, Andreina Trusgnach, Angelica Calabrese, antonisotzu, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Cassidy McLeod McKenna, Companion–Platform, Danijel Losic, Derek Scott Russell, Dora Ciccone, Eda Aslan, Elena Braida, Elena Rucli, Emmy Elvira Wassén, ERBA, Francesca Farris, Francesca Battaglia, Francesca Lucchitta, Giovanni Aloi, Giulia Bertuletti, Gregor Božič, Greta Biondi, ife collective, Jana Kiesser, Jannete Mark, jean ni, Jennifer Shin, Jessica Hollis, Jip van Steenis, Julina Vanille Bezold, Kristína Mičová, Lalie Thébault Maviel, Laura Savina, Lina v. Jaruntowski, Lindsay Buchman, Luca Vettori, Luca Battista, Ludovica Battista, Luigi Coppola, Luisa Gastaldo, Maria Elena Vecchio, Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, Martina Havlová, Martina Motta, Mia Frances LaRocca, Michael Marder, Nataša Kramberger, Ola Korbańska, Paolo Bosca, Rachele Daminelli, Rosie Ellison-Balaam, Sasha Arutyunova, Serena Abbondanza, Silvia Mascheroni, Stephanie Rebonati-Cannizzo, Teresa Carretta, Terry Cueball, Vesna Liponik, Victoria King, Vida Rucli, Vittoria Rubini

Languages: English (mainly), Italian, Slovene, French, German + local, minoritarian lan(d)guages and dialects from the regions of Benečija, Valchiavenna, Abruzzi, Bari, su Logudoru, Corsica, Gorenjska, Cetuna and the White Carpatians region.