Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives

KLITTERN (aesopica) works through the fable ‘A Wolf and a Kid’, ascribed to the ancient poet and slave Aesop. Borrowing from and dressing up in the idioms of others, the play assembles tactics and gestures of resistance for situations where no recourse to institutionalised forms of power seems advisable. Figurations of non-participation and withdrawal appear on the scene: strategies of camouflage, practices of friendship, promises of radical change, aestheticist compensations, apocalyptic fantasies and mystical transformations.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition that took place at Maison Pelgrims (10/9-23/10/2021), the book presents original interventions by the artists of the rosa rosae rosae project : Alicia Jeannin, Alicja Melzacka, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Audrey Cottin, buren, Charlie Usher, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Eva Giolo, Henry Andersen, Jan Vercruysse, Maíra Dietrich, Marc Buchy, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Niels Poiz, Oriol Vilanova, Sabir (Lucie Guien, Amélie Derlon Cordina, Sophie Sénécaut / Perrine Estienne,  Kevin Senant, Maud Marique, Pauline Allié, Carole Louis), Slow Reading Club, Sofia Caesar, Surya Ibrahim, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Yoann Van Parys

Edited by Pauline Hatzigeorgiou / SB34
Graphic design by Tipode Office
The book was produced with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (aide à l'édition) and Région Bruxelles-Capitale (Image de Bruxelles)

Poems on light and remnants. Light as mordant, as acid that etches through surface, as something that wraps itself around and between things, revealing form. The writing touches on dregs, remnants, residue and how we make sense of them, by making constellations and navigating through those diagrams. 

Anna-Rose Stefatou (b.1996, Athens) is a Greek-British artist based between Athens and London, working between moving image, installation, photography, and writing. Stefatou’s interdisciplinary works attend to stories attached to place and beginning to exist through writing, whether they become a structure to hold it, or whether language simply runs through them. Language is used both as an outset and as a distillation mechanism for ideas, with materials and imagery in visual works responding directly to the text. Gathering and repositioning knowledge guides her creative process: research includes archival footage, taking interviews, collecting objects, and location visits. This process is made visible through her material approach to the photographic image, transformed through different materials, forms and uses, as it unfolds and re-invents itself within new contexts. Stefatou graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recently, she undertook a residency at Hospitalfield House, Scotland in 2023.  Upcoming projects include an exhibition at Pharmakeion, Athens in 2025 as well as a publication Dregs, Beacons that will be realised in 2025.

(...) There is no one on the chair, there is no hand on the table, perhaps nobody on the floor. The set up is empty, but some kind of unsettling presence is undeniable. The set up is so obviously fake that there must be something behind it. I am not going to lie: I am going to lie.
If I lie, there is a deliberated stand. I don't have to be "true", to myself, to others. My intention is not to find lying moving, but those who can never lie cannot grow either, cannot discover who they really are. The people, that every day are forced to rip off their personality into fragments, know something about themselves and about life that nobody could teach them. Lying, betraying, is to want to or be able to transform a situation, a fact, an emotion, oneself. The act of lying suddenly un-conceals what has been considered as neutral or as the reference point. The power relations already in place are being revealed, "normality" appears as hegemony. The lie embodies a transgression. It is an attempt to escape normative structures and the refusal to assimilate them. (...)

Includes contributions by Christian Noelle Charles, Andrej Dubravsky, Sandra Golubjevaite, Lewis Hammond, Tarek Lakhrissi, Nils Amadeus Lange, Floriane Michel, Stijn Pommée, Adam Ulbert

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty

In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style approach of internet theorist Joshua Citarella, as well as the practices of Alex Quicho and Sophie Public, this essay delves into the diverse strategies internet researchers adopt to share their work and sustain their careers more or less independently in today's era defined by the attention economy.

Charting the rise of subscription-based platforms and the increasing importance of engagement-driven metrics, Becoming the Product uncovers the tension between intellectual critique and the pressures of commodification. As the lines blur between rigorous scholarship, aesthetic branding, and market-driven content, Becoming the Product investigates the future of critical internet research and the sustainability of critical thinking as we know it in the digital age.

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.