Girls Like Us #6 - Secrets

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 long lost poem purportedly by Rimbaud is finally made available in English.

Referenced only in a few letters of Paul Verlaine, The Spiritual Hunt is Arthur Rimbaud's forgotten masterwork, a poem in five parts that explored the mystic philosophy that guided the young poet's heart and hand. Considered lost for years, a typewritten manuscript appeared in Paris in the late 1920s, circulating around a close-knit group of booksellers, poets, and playwrights. Yet it wasn't until 1949 that Mercure de France took the initiative to publish the unauthenticated galley and unleashed a literary controversy that shook France. Sides were drawn, with Andre Breton leading the charge of forgery, calling the work an utter hoax, and others defending it as legitimate and an essential key to understanding Rimbaud and his work. Bookstores were raided for copies, critics were skewered in journals, and tempers flared on radio and in print, but no conclusive judgement could be drawn and Mercure de France withdrew the work from publication and pulped all the copies they could find.

Now, seventy-five years after its initial imbroglio, The Spiritual Hunt is available in English for the first time with a facsimile letterpress edition of the original. Featuring Pascal Pia's original introduction along with an edifying afterword by translator Emine Ersoy.

The eighth issue of Errant Journal questions the ways in which hegemonic culture and discourse tends to prioritize the ideal of openness, access, transparency, and visibility. Delving into topics such as face coverings, ‘coming out’ in queer discourses, the use of opacity in transformative justice, and different strategies of (visual) resistance, ‘Against Visibility’ can be read as a proposition of refusal of the paradigm of visibility and access that permeates all areas of western thinking. At a moment in which representation and uncovering ‘lost’ histories are trending, Errant asks what is being erased in a world where everything must always be visible. When Édouard Glissant proclaimed the right to opacity, he sought not to be reduced or to be measured against an ideal scale in order to be understood and accepted. Expanding from this, Against Visibility looks into the ways in which unlearning imperialism also includes unlearning the ideal of visibility itself.

Contributors: Vivi Alfonsín, Leila Ben Abdallah, Mariam Ben Slama, Michèle Boulogne, Irene de Craen, AmaraChíkà Emele-Ralph, Cosmo M. Esposito, Jamie McGhee, Ludovica Micalizzi, Nadine Monem, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Musa Shadeedi, Federica Stagni

Phylactère est une revue annuelle à voix multiples, née du désir d’explorer l’écriture de l’oralité et les possibilités de retranscription de performance, à travers des visions authentiques, subjectives et spontanées. Donnant la parole à des amateur·ice·s, artiste·s, designer·s et penseur·se·s, la revue Phylactère regroupe des écrits de transition, assumant tous les glissements entre un script, l’action réalisée et sa traduction, avec une attention extrême et aventureuse pour la manière dont les contextes, gestes, émotions et espaces sont mis en jeu lors de cette retranscription.

Initiée par Roxanne Maillet et Auriane Preud’homme à l’invitation de Camille Videcoq lors de la résidence Entrée Principale (Marseille), Phylactère conjugue pratique graphique et éditoriale et démarche curatoriale en intégrant au processus de publication l’organisation de différents événements. 

Pour son deuxième numéro, Phylactère prend pour titre l’onomatopée Oh là là !

Avec les contributions de : Anne Lise Le Gac, Benoît Le Boulicaut, Camille Videcoq, Cecil Serres, Claudia Pagès, Considered to be Allies (Margaux Parillaud & Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen), Ghita Skali, Giuliana Zefferi, Lauren Tortil, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Mona Gérardin-Laverge, Nygel Panasco, pauline l. boulba, Sarah Browne, Susie Green (with Kim Coleman, Simon Bayliss & Rory Pilgrim), Tahnee, L’autre and Tiziana La Melia.

Conception graphique : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet.

A dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and "old school homosexual" who bears a big resemblance to author Brontez Purnell.

Our hero doesn't trust the new breed of fags taking over San Francisco, though. They wear bicycle helmets, seat belts, and condoms. Meanwhile, he sabotages his relationships, hallucinating affection while cruising in late night parks, bath-houses, and other nooks and crannies of a newly-conservative, ruined city.

Furiously original, vital, and messy, this funny "non-memoir" uncovers a revelatory truth for the age: there are things far scarier than HIV.

BRAIDS is a 130 pages-long publication that features both visual and written works of 20 young creatives. The desire of BRAIDS is to expand the idea of queerness beyond the borders of identity. The journal exists to host bodies that deny framing and dare to expose the vulnerability of their difference. The publication is thus a woven story of the contemporary globalised queer, insecure but daring, honey-glazed yet continuously aching.