Girls Like Us #2 — Issue 2

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

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.

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories, and the often accidental influences that have shaped how their practices have developed.

A Book Knot Book is a 208 pages long performance, the first from the research and publishing initiative Body Text. In this study of language in action systems of meaning-making crash, sparkle and swoon. In a playful voice over A Book Knot Book self-reflects on the materialities and choreographies of publishing, reading and writing. With guest stars in fragments; Monique Wittig, Yvonne Rainer, Cristina Rivera Garza, Amiri Baraka, Will Rawls, David Abram, Thich Nhat Hanh and more. 

Edited and designed by Sara Kaaman. Published with the support of Stockholm University of the Arts.

A textual and historigraphical odyssey imbued with queer intergenerational yearning and loss.

Don't Leave Me This Way blends archival research with sexual fantasy to produce a series of sonnets inspired by Gaétan Dugas, named by Randy Shilts as "Patient Zero" of the AIDS epidemic in North America. Committed to the utopian possibilities of elegy and pornography, Don't Leave Me This Way exploits the absurdist beauty of the cut-up technique to voice a chorus of lost spirits: poignant, vengeful, and ready to ball.

It is a particularly unlovely time to be thinking about romance. The heart can be fickle, indulgent, its matters distracting, impractical. But in the heavy boots of our undesirable present, seized by colliding catastrophes, we ask: how do we get out of here? Can the simple math of desire plus futurity break us free? Or is this just a barely veiled expression of our longing for avoidance? When we declare that love is the answer, we often forget the ambivalence of which psychoanalysis warns: love emerges in tandem with hate. It is neither the antidote to aggression nor the basis of a coherent social order. 

As a narrative structure, romance insists on the future. Whether it's with a new lover hoping to break the repetition of bad patterns, in emotional growth born of the analytic couple, or inside the tremulous energy of an insurgent crowd that makes yesterday seem historically distinct from tomorrow, romance threads time with the texture of meaning. Perhaps delusional, perhaps heroic in this audacious promise, romance must also always be a fantasy, an imagined structure that has not yet met its match in the present. While this fantasy is vital to our attachment to the world and each other, it can also provide the fuel for self-serving denial and disavowal. When we say that the youth are not fucking and that they don’t care about politics, these separate charges obscure the nature of their common cause. As the world attempts to disavow the death of the earth and the removal of its peoples, our sense of continuity flees; the receding horizon is not an open road, but a vanishing point. Whither romance? 

Dependent. Detached. Trauma Bonded. The Incest Lobby. Revolution Against Romance. Reading for Love and Labor. Surrealist Bedfellows. Mad Love. Essays by Nadia Bou Ali, hannah baer, Moon Charania, Davey Davis, Kaleem Hawa, Anna Kornbluh, Thomas Ogden, and more.

First comprehensive monograph of the Swedish queer and feminist performance artist.

Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown is the first comprehensive presentation of Line Skywalker Karlström's work. It documents a practice, that over a period of more than twenty years have been committed to "queer feminist world making" using a performative and embodied approach. Correspondingly with Skywalker Karlström's understanding of art as a chaotic and associative knowledge production, which unfolds as a collaborative and ongoing conversation, their book has become a bastard monograph, which describes an artistic practice through its relationships and its flock. For the book, Skywalker Karlström has invited a number of colleagues to engage in conversations with them departing from selected works and jointly attempt to expand upon the strengths and qualities of queer and feminist artistic strategies. In addition to an extensive documentation of works, drawings and ephemera, Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown contains a number of inserts with works by other artists, which have informed Skywalker Karlström's art practice.

Line Skywalker Karlström (born 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swedish performance artist who works with a diverse range of materials dealing with the role of art in life, lesbian and gay identity and the perception of space. Her performances take place in the public realm and also in gallery installations. Karlström was a member of the feminist performance group High Heels Sisters (2002-2007), and a founding member of YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005-2018), a group of Swedish artist activists that she left in 2009.