Marking The Occasion

To want to reveal; to want to reveal enough; to desire; to desire in the right way, the right amount: in her debut book, Rachel James narrates the desiring subject’s nuanced and entangled intimacies with histories of power. How, in other words, under patriarchy, against misogyny, within capitalist strictures, is knowledge shaped, contained, and transferred? Tracing traditions of theater, pedagogy, and faith, An Eros Encyclopedia offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life—a method to navigate, perceive, and relate against the illusion of separation.

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.

Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.

Rodrigo Quijano’s An Inherent Tear assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay “A Terrace in Valparaiso,” translated into English for the first time by Judah Rubin. Written during the Fujimori years of the 1990s—a period characterized by the end of the conflict between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgency, the Peruvian army, and the Marxist-Leninist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—Quijano’s bracingly mournful and incisively wry poems insist that we not turn away from the unburied dead. Shifting between neo-baroque hermeticism and a poetics of the conversational, his work destabilizes lyric subjectivity, testing the limits of the structure of metaphor to relay the impasses of the present. Reflecting almost twenty years later from the “city of wildfires,” Quijano’s essay charts the continued landscape of state violence that carries with it the “payroll of bones” Cesar Vallejo evoked nearly a century earlier. In this new, searing collection, Quijano searches amid the smoke and the ashes for “A place to spend the night, / or a language to speak in, / walking through the desert, or drilling into our / insubstantial dreams.” 

About the author
Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, São Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

About the translator
Judah Rubin is the author, most recently, of Antiquarian Historiography (Oxeye Press, 2020). Recent translations can be found in the anthology The Beauty Salons/Salones de la Belleza (Aeromoto/Gato Negro/UNAM, 2021), the journals Firmament and Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum and lives in Queens, New York.

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

The first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American postmodern dancer, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings.

A foundational figure in dance, Blondell Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup, Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography.

This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Blondell Cummings (1944-2015) was a choreographer and video artist who mined everyday experiences like washing, cooking and building to create works celebrated for their rich characterizations and dramatic momentum. According to Wendy Perron, Cummings crossed over from modern to postmodern, from the Black dance community to the avant-garde community. Cummings referred to her stop-motion movement vocabulary as "moving pictures," which combined her interests in the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement. Her dances drew from an accumulation of character studies that often began with photography and workshops, and included poetry, oral histories, and projection. Her interest in moving pictures is also evidenced in her commitment to dance films. She both supported the documentation of dance, and created many experimental dance films.

Edited by Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, Glenn Phillips.
Texts by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Tara Aisha Willis, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Blondell Cummings, Veta Goler.

Bringing together thirty authors variously invested in dance, performance and/or choreography; This Container is a zine for texts produced through and alongside dance, performance and choreography. Some write more than dance; others dance more than write. Some practice choreography explicitly; others implicitly. However varied the authors gathered here may be, the expansive field of performance produces all kinds of texts that deserve public recognition, a readership, and an infrastructure for feedback and editing. This issue is another attempt at making this possible.
 
With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Jani Anders Purhonen, Simon Asencio, Mélanie Blaison, Oda Brekke, Juan Pablo Cámara, Laura Cemin, Matt Cornell, Stina Ehn, Emma Fishwick, Lucija Grbic, Sara Gebran, Andreas Haglund, Hugo Hedberg, Alice Heyward, Madlen Hirtentreu, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Nikima Jagudajev, Sonjis Laine, Yoojin Lee, Denise Lim, Theo Livesey, Naya Moll, Caterina Mora, Rhiannon Newton, Zander Porter, Lena Schwingshandl and Stav Yeini.
 
Since its inception, This Container has hoped to contribute to a feminist lineage of textual production. What constitutes this lineage? This is a vast question. The beginning of an answer might start by saying something about genre. If , as Lauren Berlant writes, genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation”, a “formalization of aesthetic or emotional conventionalities”, then genre crafts expectation by pointing to what is recognizable in form.1 If feminism is about wanting the world to be otherwise, the multiplication of genres inducing the multiplication of (imagined) stories helps to recraft expectation toward a less oppressive, less boring, and more just world. Feminist work includes genre work. Poetry, diary, diagram, notes, recipe, critique, the sound file, the epistolary, the essay, the art project: they have all found their way in, sculpting a diverse set of readerly structures of affective expectation. They are to shift your worldly expectations.

More info at http://www.thiscontainer.com

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.