Aisopika Aesopica

A book that examines the process of performing the self, distinctive for the formation of the self in Western neoliberal societies in the 21st century. It approaches the self from a transdisciplinary angle where political and cultural anthropology, performance studies and dramaturgy intersect.

Starting from their concern with the crisis of the social, which coincides with the rise of individualism, Vujanović and Cvejić critically untangle individualist modes of performing the self, such as possessive, aesthetic, and autopoietic individualisms. However, their critique does not make for an argument for collectivism as a socially more viable alternative to individualism. Instead, it confronts them with the more fundamental problem of ontogenesis: how is that which distinguishes me as an individual formed in the first place? This question marks a turning point in the study, where it steps back into the process of individuation, prior to, and in excess of, the individual. 

The process of individuation, however, encompasses biological, social, and technological conditions of becoming whose real potential is transindividual, or more specifically, social transformation. A ‘theater of individuation’ (Gilbert Simondon) captures the dramaturgical stroke by which the authors investigate social relations (like solidarity and de-alienation) in which the self actualizes its transindividual dimension. This epistemic intervention into ontogenesis allows them to expand the horizon of transindividuation in an array of tangible social, aesthetic and political acts and practices. As with every horizon, the transindividual may not be closely at hand; however, it is certainly within reach, and the book encourages the reader to approach it.

"Towards a Transindividual Self is an ambitious and capacious effort to theorize a new way to approach collectivity for political purposes through the lens of performance. Convinced that the current neoliberal conjuncture has only heightened a form of capitalist individualism that blocks notions of the social, the authors aim to show that a "transindividual formation of the self can bring about different courses of action and a more socially driven imagination." Transindividuation, they assure us, shows how "we form ourselves on the basis of interdependence, sharing, commonality, as well as indispensability of the individual as the agent of creativity/ knowledge, freedom, and change, who 'possibilizes' their own conditions of formation." 
— Professor Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick), co-editor of Critical Theory and Performance (University of Michigan, 2006)

"Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the manner in which it is able to engage with multiple discourses from political theory to aesthetics. In this way it both follows the ambitious scope of Simondon’s work on individuation, and expands into areas that Simondon did not cover, most notably politics and cultural politics, which is the book’s central concern. Rather than ask the question is the individual imagined or real, an effect of social relations or their distortion, the focus on the transindividual makes it possible to grasp individuation as a process: “Instead of pondering how the passage from one to many occurs, individuation permits us to immediately trace a bidimensional process in which both individual persons and the collectivities they form are altered. Another meaning of the crisis of the social has brought about a perfect slogan of such a process of transindividuation: ‘No one will be left alone in the crisis.” (…) Towards a Transindividual Self does a brilliant job of not only arguing for the importance and relevance for the transindividual as a concept for politics, performance, and the politics of performance, but of demonstrating a bold standard for political and aesthetic inquiry."
— Professor Jason Read (University of Maine), author of The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015)

Co-published by Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Sarma and Multimedijalni institut.

24 transcribed public conversations led by Xavier Le Roy with artists and cultural workers, creating a space where Le Roy's work meets the experiences of his guests.

Lives Shaping Works Making Life is a collection of 24 transcribed public conversations titled Practices: Strategies and Tactics, led by Xavier Le Roy and hosted by the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen between November 2022 and November 2024. These dialogues bring together artists and cultural workers creating a space where Xavier Le Roy's work engages in conversation with the experiences of each guest. Each encounter follows the same set of 14 questions—printed on the book's cover—which serve as a flexible framework guiding the conversations. Through the careful editing of Giulia Casartelli, Daniel Cordova, and Livia Andrea Piazza, these conversations have been transformed into vivid, polyphonic texts that invite further reflection and offer a point of departure for expanding the dialogue beyond the original live encounters.

Conversations with Antonia Baehr, Matthias Mohr, João Fiadeiro, Herbordt / Mohren, Carolina Mendonça, Rolf Michenfelder, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić, Joana Tischkau, Giulia Casartelli, Susanne Zaun & Judith Altmeyer, Florence Lam, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Jorge Alencar & Neto Machado, Rabih Mroué, Ruth Geiersberger, Swoosh Lieu, Arkadi Zaides, Valeria Graziano, Mette Edvardsen, Mala Kline, Sarah Parolin, Andros Zins-Browne, Rose Beermann.

In 1962 at the age of 71, Joseph Elmer Yoakum (circa 1891–1972) reported having a dream that inspired him to draw. Thereafter the retired veteran began a daily practice and over the next 10 years produced some 2,000 works. 

Yoakum was born into poverty, had very little schooling, and at an early age left home to join a circus. He wound up working with several circuses, traveling across the United States as well as abroad and becoming intimately familiar with the world's various landscapes. These experiences would provide the foundational memories that fueled his deeply spiritual vision decades later. 

When he began to put that vision to paper in his apartment on Chicago's South Side in the early 1960s, Yoakum quickly developed a unique visual language, independent and distinct from other artists in the city, such as those involved in the flourishing Black Arts Movement or the up-and-coming Chicago Imagist group. His drawings—predominantly landscapes in ballpoint pen, colored pencil, pastel, and watercolor and inscribed with locations from all seven continents—reflect the scope of his national and international travels as well as his idiosyncratic and poetic vision of the natural world.

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Published in tumult of “Planters, a garden show” by COUR: with Noëmi Orgaer, Orson Van Beek, Charlotte Bombel, Moreno Schweikle, Shun Yoon, Yen Proesmans, Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, HansWuyts, Malte van der Meyden, Fritz Adamski, Hannah Kuhlmann, Delphine Lejeune, Grażyna Mielech and Giseok Kim. 

We stand at the edge of the world’s mercy, as subjects destined to fall. Instead, we posit: what might unfurl when we discard the uniform of the individual, and instead orient towards tinkering with the fluctuating dynamics of desire, value, infrastructure, touch, and language. Don’t be fooled, for the dynamics are brittle. Unrestricted interplay has a limit, and method is to be found at its rim. That a tangible or decorative item may serve as recognition or evidence of merit might somehow become a logic of itself. This publication presents a collection of explorations of excess, limitation, dehydrated thought, proclivity, sublimation, debauchery, and the narrowly-defined. Indeed, the subject is destined to fall, but ultimately does not! As we reckon with the illegibility of merit, we are beckoned to reconsider our relationship to one another, the unseen settings of nostalgia, the monolithic, and the stifling hold that comes not from the absence of violence, but the sheer overabundance of it. The winner just might take it all,but we’re all destined to some sort of trophy.

with Brandon Chow, Jody Aikman, Kessy Paller-Bain, Maximilian Pellizzari, Milda Valiulytė, António Manso, Preto Macarena, Magaña Villar, Sara Vallis, Cecilie Jensen, Iris Verge Ferrer, Mia You, Mehmet Süzgün, Emma Adjari, gervaise alexis savvias, Emanuella Cunt, Greta þorkelsdóttir. Designed by Miglė Lukoševičiūtė

Eshkol and Wachmann focused dance on its basic element: the movement of the human body. They treated the different parts of the body as separate instruments, similar to the musical instruments of an orchestra–each with its own rules for the movements to be performed. This new edition of the 1958 publication is supplemented by contributions from Eshkol’s companions and further archive material, which contextualizes and supplements the history of the 'EWMN’s‘ origins and embeds it in contemporary discourses on dance and movement. 

The publication is published in the context of the performance 'Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group‘ at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (August 2023), as well as the exhibition 'Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance‘ at the Georg Kolbe Museum (15 March–25 August 2024). The new edition was developed together with the 'Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation‘.