Incantation, Wendy

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

An essay on art, bodies and fascism.

In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?

In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.

A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.

‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’
— Eileen Myles

‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’
— Juliet Jacques

Variations is the debut short story collection from one of Britain’s most compelling voices, Juliet Jacques. Using fiction inspired by found material and real-life events, Variations explores the history of transgender Britain with lyrical, acerbic wit. 

Variations travels from Oscar Wilde’s London to austerity-era Belfast via inter-war Cardiff, a drag bar in Liverpool just after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, Manchester’s protests against Clause 28, and Brighton in the 2000s. Through diary entries of an illicit love affair, an oral history of a contemporary political collective; a 1920s academic paper to a 1990s film script; a 1950s memoir to a series of 2014 blog posts, Jacques rewrites and reinvigorates a history so often relegated to stale police records and sensationalist news headlines.

Innovative and fresh, Variations is a bold and beautiful book of stories unheard; until now.

With the vinyl recording of a musical, the artist proposes a new chapter in her project on fermentation as a living, palpable theory that blends body, feminism, and community.

Gut Feelings is a musical sung and performed by giant bacteria. It is a reference to lesbian separatist communities and more specifically to their capacity to create other forms and ways of life, outside of unliveable norms. The motif of fermentation here becomes a metaphor for the activity of a micro-organic and ungendered community, both human and non-human, alive, moving and changing form. In the manner of fermentation, this community in constant activity evolves autonomously, feeding itself and the space around it.

Louise Siffert (born 1988 in Strasbourg, lives and works in Paris) is a French performer. The world of work, alienation, the search for well-being, the place of habits: Louise Siffert's performances question and relate these current themes in theatrical and burlesque settings. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological reflections, she creates characters with exacerbated personalities, overexploiting the codes of language and behavior that are attributed to them.

Clipping 2: Sum, Parts brings together transcripts, commissioned texts, studies, and personal reflections that explore how transformation is central to building archives that remain alive through time. Clipping, in sonic terms, signals distortion—moments when excess pushes beyond clarity and opens new spaces of possibility.

The issue features contributions by Monique Todd, Andrea Zarza Canova, Cleo Tsw, Zahra Malkani, meLê yamomo, Melisa Cenik, Golnoosh Heshmati, Voice as Landscape (Alec Mateo and Lorenzo García-Andrade Llamas), Atiyyah Khan, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Femke Dekker, and Alice Twemlow. It is edited by Federica Notari and Cleo Tsw, designed by Catherine Hu and Cleo Tsw, and printed and bound by No Kiss.

Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners. 

Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.

As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."

Contributors include: Raven Chacon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lou Cornum, Grace Dillon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miguel Hilari, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Pedro Neves Marques, Fox Maxy, Michael Metzger, Jas M. Morgan, Caroline Monnet, Shelley Niro, Adam Piron, Tiare Ribeaux, Diana Flores Ruíz, Walter Scott, Girish Shambu, Paul Chaat Smith, Adam Spry, Elizabeth Weatherford.

This book was published in conjunction with COUSIN Collective.

A collection of Pauline Julier’s art that expands from the terrestrial to the cosmos to comment on our place in the universe. 

At the interface of documentary and fiction, the multimedia works collected in Pauline Julier take us on a dizzying journey through space and time. Julier’s art travels through the geological ages of planet Earth, through different histories, natural disasters, and the Anthropocene’s paradigm shifts and into outer space. Her background in political science and photography is reflected in her work: looking into the past and the future, she investigates topical questions about our unlimited use of natural resources, escapism, and the colonization of space. 

Conceived and designed as a work of art in its own right, this volume offers a comprehensive insight into Julier’s art and thought through a conversation with eminent scholar of science and technology studies Donna Haraway alongside contributions by curator Céline Eidenbenz, anthropologist, and writer Nastassja Martin, and art historian, curator, and author Chus Martínez. 

Edited by Céline Eidenbenz and Sarah Mühlebach.

With Contributions by Donna Haraway, Pauline Julier, Nastassja Martin, and Chus Martínez.

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.