Deleuzine Volume 2: She-Dogs

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries. 

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

Adorno’s Noise is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays. Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.” — AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.” — ROB HALPERN

Carla Harryman is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. An active collaborator, she is one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Collective Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980 (2006-2010). Open Box, a CD of music and spoken text performance created with composer and musician Jon Raskin was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater plays and music/text collaborations have been performed nationally and internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, where she presented the closing keynote performance Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a music/text work that folds segments of Adorno’s Noise into her poetic adaptation of Adorno’s lecture. She is the editor of two critical volumes: Non/Narrative, a special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory ( 2012) and Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (with Avital Ronell and Amy Scholder, Verso, 2006).

Other books by Carla Harryman include the collection of poetry and performance writings published in French and English editions Sue in Berlin and Sue á Berlin (2017); A Voice to Perform (Split/Level 2020); the epistolary essay, Artifact of Hope (2017); the diptych W—/M— (2013), Gardener of Stars: A Novel (2001), and two volumes of selected writing: Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (1995). Her grants and awards include The Foundation of Contemporary Art, New York, Opera America Next Stage (with Erling Wold), and The Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty in Creative Activity Award from Eastern Michigan University, where she serves on the faculty of an interdisciplinary creative writing program.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Revue du Master de Textes et de Création Littéraire de la Cambre*

Avec les textes de: Sam Bouffandeau, Chloé Clemens, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Robin Faymonville, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Adèle Goardet, Bastien Hauser, Giulia Lazzara, Cyprien Muth, Sephora Shebabo.

* Le Master en Textes et Création Littéraire de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre propose un programme de formation aux étudiants qui visent à faire des métiers du texte et de la création littéraire leur avenir professionnel. Il s’adresse principalement aux jeunes écrivains et, plus généralement, à l’étudiant qui souhaite professionnaliser sa démarche artistique en lien avec la pratique de l’écrit en la confrontant à d’autres écrivains, à des éditeurs et à des professionnels reconnus de la littérature, l’informer et l’enrichir de nouveaux savoirs et de nouvelles compétences. Considérant le travail du texte et ses différentes formes comme des expressions majeures de l’homme à travers l’histoire, et les littératures des différents continents comme un art à part entière dans le champ des pratiques artistiques contemporaines, ce Master s’inscrit dans une démarche ouverte de production, de réflexion et d’instruction de l’écrit dans un monde en devenir.

The artist's travel diary in New York.

Where will my mouth lead me? This question arises already in the first days of Hamza Halloubi's residency in New York. It characterises his diary entries from August to November 2024. He observes the art world, comments on cultural and political events and thinks about writers and artists who have long intrigued him and what his body and their ideas are doing in this city–and what this city does not do to him and them: David Hammons, Edward Saïd, Mohamed Choukri, Félix González-Torres… How they also appear like ghosts in his work. Hamza Halloubi approaches the viewer of his visual work, and here also the reader, as a social and political presence. In addition to his diary and image fragments from his films and exhibitions, this pocket book also includes two interviews with the artist.

Hamza Halloubi (born 1982 in Tangier, Morocco, lives and works between Brussels, Tangier, and Amsterdam) is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on video and painting.

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

In the first issue of Sore, observations of everyday life intertwined with memories and cultural references to denote the significance of a certain soreness we each carry within us as we negotiate the various challenges of social existence. In this second ensemble, seven new authors widen our understanding of the term ‘sore’ by underlining a need to orient one’s gaze towards what’s hidden underneath, to enter the anatomy of all these necessary contortions and u-turns one performs in order to escape the grip of expected compliance.

With contributions from: Mathilde Heuliez, Lisa Lagova, Muyeong Kim, Nour Ben Saïd, Masha Ryabova, Adrienne Chung, Richard Dmitri Hees, Oscar Le Merle, Morra Kozlitina, Tindra Eliason, Helmer Stuyt, Ilya Stasevich, Kristina Stallvik.

Published by cover crop, Mathilde Heuliez & Lisa Lagova.