MAKAN #2 / Manufacturing Narratives

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta’s 4th monograph, Iman Mersal navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child. 

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.

Text: Iman Mersal
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Robin Moger
Co-publishers: Kayfa ta and Sternberg Press
Design: Julie Peeters
Size: 9.6 x 14.8 cm
Pages: 168 pages, Soft cover

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.

Building on the foundations of the first two issues, Synthetic Agencies invites a rethinking [and unthinking] of the assumptions, polarities, and discontents surrounding the notion of agency. Traditionally defined in Western thought as the capacity to act and effect change, agency is inseparable from questions of power and the often invisible structures through which power operates. The various contributions interrogate how agency is produced, constrained, or distributed through the systems of knowledge, design, and governance that shape our built environments, technologies, media, and cultures. They were are invited to right (as much as write on) agency, reflecting on how it operates across different scales and contexts, and imagining alternative worlds or configurations. Ultimately, Synthetic Agencies understands agency not as a fixed attribute but as a contested lens through which we might read, reshape, or resist the conditions of the present.

With contributions by Amine Houari, Driss Ksikes, Fehras Publishing Practices, Hamed Sinno, Helga Tawil-Souri, Lada Hršak, Mayada Madbouly, Myriam Ababsa, Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Ola Hassanain, Omer Shah, OPPA, Salma Barmani, Samia Henni, Tarek El-Ariss, Zaidoun Hajjar.

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the middle-class household. 

Text: Haytham El-Wardany
Editors: Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis
Translated from Arabic by Jennifer Peterson (Preliminary Exercises) and Robin Moger (Sounds of the Middle Classes)

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

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.

The seventh issue of Errant Journal is guest edited by Ghiwa Sayegh and aims to interrogate the role of the body in strategies of resistance from below. Taking Palestine as a starting point, the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and other colonial powers and the people’s continued struggle for liberation inform the issue’s thinking and praxis. From this political standpoint, it explores the ways in which bodies – that are sexualized, criminalized, racialized, crip – have been able to divert and subvert in order to fight back. To resist from the body is what crip theory tells us is a matter of need. It is a body that no longer fears deviation, specifically because of how cheap our lives are considered and how dangerous our futures are treated. It is about finding community and kinship when we are told we are alone.

Contributors:
Myriam Amri, Lama Abou Kharroub, yasamin ghalehnoie, Keto Gorgadze, Johanna Hedva, Samia Henni, MaxX • ماكس, Ada Maricia Patterson, Ghiwa Sayegh, Nikita Sena, Mridula Sharma

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.