Impossible Dreams

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

A long conversation about the work and life of Portuguese artist Ana Jotta, accompanied by 60 previously unpublished photographs of her homes (in Brazil, Morocco, and Zanzibar) and her years in theater in the late 1970s.

“Peau d’Ana” is a conversation with the Portuguese artist Ana Jotta (1946), conducted in January 2024 by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, and Baptiste Pinteaux in the Lisbon apartment that Ana has occupied for over forty years. Through the history of both this unique place and the various other homes in which she has lived — Tangier, Madeira, Brazil, and the Portuguese countryside — Ana Jotta mischievously and playfully invites us to revisit fragments of her life. She discusses her childhood, her work as an actress and set designer, her first exhibitions in the mid-1980s, and her life in the studio. She talks about the importance of pleasure and frustration, her love of painting and literature, and the role of the irrational in her work. She shares her dislike of families, her friendships with artists and other animals, and the detours necessary for finding, and preserving, the energy essential for work… and for sleep. She disarms with the precision of her words, which describe a solitary, demanding, and profoundly vivid existence where mediocrity has no place. The interview, published in French and English, is accompanied by some sixty previously unpublished photographs and documents.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

Arthur’s Whims is the tale of “a modern saint,” a love story born of a childhood dream of being “alone on a boat with a boy, a friend.” Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. It is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Dana Lupo. This edition includes Hervé Guibert’s essay “The Bear,” in which he compares his books to rooms in a house, writing: “Arthur’s Whims would be the library of the house, and the bedroom of a child who will never be.” It is “a true adventure novel in the tradition of the genre, or what I believed to be its tradition, with great journeys, disasters, shipwrecks, cataclysms.”

“This short novel, offered here along with an essay by Guibert, reads like a madcap picaresque—one in which bodies can transform, the pace is constantly accelerating, and geography proves to be malleable. A gloriously surreal account of an unexpected voyage.” — Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

Hervé Guibert was a French photographer, critic, and author. Born in 1955, he published works of autofiction, novels, short stories, and essays, including many on photography. His writing was often deeply personal, ironic, and centered on illness and the body. Guibert died from complications of AIDS in 1991, at the age of thirty-six.

Dana Lupo is a writer and translator based in New York. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Bone & Ink Press, Arcturus (Chicago Review of Books), Apricity Press, and elsewhere. Arthur’s Whims is their first published translation.

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

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine Appendix #3 Orality includes contributions by Simon Asencio, Bruno De Wachter, Peter Szendy, Clara Amaral, Itziar Okariz, Jude Joseph, Léa Poiré and Mette Edvardsen.

Time has The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers* (2022–23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making this publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during their residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments – on paper, between pages.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.

The Appendixes is the work that continues, material that adds on, some of it perhaps too long or too detailed, unfit or unfinished. The four themes that their research is formulated around originate in specific experiences and questions from the practices of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010 – ongoing), and also the large publication on the project ‘A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books’ (2019). The research was both a means of exploring these themes in greater depth and also of bringing them into contact with other artists and researchers working on similar or related subjects. The Appendixes offered them both the contexts and the pretexts for things to happen (in time, in space, on paper).

The Appendixes #1–4, published in these cahiers, do not present an overview or a summary of all of the activities and presentations that took place during the two years at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. What these cahiers offer is a space in which to hold some thoughts together and to share them in this form. It is one more step along the way, extending the research and work already begun and that will now continue.

During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he’s been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to listen.

Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces’ distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, intimacy in crisis, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.