F.R. David - what I mean is—

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.

The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…

Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”) is an artist-run publication based in Brussels and Vancouver. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. Le Chauffage brings together the work and writing of artists / friends from different cities with the  intent to spark discussion and fuel casual forms of critical discourse.

The second issue of Le Chauffage contains photographs and texts, photographs of text, photographs as text and vice versa. Loosely thinking through the format of The Photo Essay celebrated by John Szarkowski in an eponymously titled exhibition at MoMA in 1965, this issue considers some of the artistic possibilities that can be found in such an archaic and historically male-dominated form. 

Many of the contributions that make up this second issue are not photo essays per se. But each one of them considers the printed page as a space in its own right. The magazine becomes an interior where words and images entertain a malleable and distinctly porous relationship. At times, it is also a space where artists and writers from different cities were invited to meet and collaborate. And since interest in other people is also an interest in yourself, it is always unclear who is really transforming who?

Contributions by: Bob Cain & Linda Miller, Moyra Davey, Laurie Kang, Niklas Taleb, Madeleine Paré & Diane Severin Nguyen, Josephine Pryde, Slow Reading Club, Ken Lum, Isaac Thomas, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Artun Alaska Arasli & Graeme Wahn, Stephen Waddell, Maya Beaudry & Chloe Chignell, Lisa Robertson, groana melendez, Victoria Antoinette Megens and Will Holder.

Editors: Emile Rubino and Felix Rapp
Co-Editor: Francesca Percival
Design: Francesca Percival and Felix Rapp
Cover Design: Francesca Percival
Printed by: Cassochrome, Belgium
Edition of 350

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.

Handmade artist's book combining drawings, photographs, and archival materials. This publication reflects on the YouYou Group's ten-year journey and its evolving relationship with space. It marks a transitional moment from the group's long-term engagement with public space toward a growing understanding of spatiality and collective presence.

YouYou Group is a Belgian choir that specializes in what is known in Arabic as zaghareed. This trilling cry is used by women at weddings and festive occasions, but also at funerals. Youyou is the French name for zaghareed. Depending on the regional origin, it is also called kululu, tsahalulim, or irrintzi. It is a long, shrill tone that is modulated (by the throat, glottis, or rapid tongue movements) and can be heard from far away. Brussels artist Myriam Van Imschoot was one of the founders of this singing group.

This publication is presented as an object-book-manifesto of a ‘desespiegles’ way of thinking. It “translates” the trains of thought that architect-artists Anne Philippe and Jolien Naeyaert exchanged via videoletters. The videoletters mainly occurred during the covid period. Questioning the scope of the addressed images, these exchanges revealed a play of symmetries. It shows a series of interrogations, linking the intimate with the collective. The move towards a publication was obvious after conversations with Loes, Phyllis, An and Teresa of nadine. The desire to activate reading in a performative way, mirrors the exchange of videoletters. It continues the process-based methodology that inventively gave birth to a publication through the physical manipulation of the work. The riso-technique proved particularly suitable for this project, as the hands, the gaze and the exchange all played a role during the object-making process.

Dannie.n is an art-zine, published by nadine, about the artistic research, themes, and topics of discussion of the artists involved in nadine. nadine invites an artist or collective to create each new edition.

Dannie.p is a limited-edition artist's book by desespiegles (57 copies). nadine is supported by Vlaamse Gemeenschap, VGC, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest.

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference. 

The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily van der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.