Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal

A genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force—water—through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers. 

For many years, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson took solace in skiing—in all kinds of weather, on all kinds of snow across all kinds of terrain, often following the trail beside a beloved creek near her home. Recently, as she skied on this path against the backdrop of uncertainty, environmental devastation, rising authoritarianism and ongoing social injustice, her mind turned to the water in the creek and an elemental question: What might it mean to truly listen to water? To know water? To exist with and alongside water?

So began a quest to understand her people's historical, cultural, and ongoing interactions with water in all its forms (ice, snow, rain, perspiration, breath). Pulling together these threads, Leanne began to see how a "Theory of Water" might suggest a radical rethinking of relationships between beings and forces in the world today. In this inventive work, Simpson draws on Nishnaabeg origin stories while artfully weaving the work of influential writers and artists alongside her personal memories and experience—and in doing so, reimagines water as a catalyst for radical transformation, capable of birthing a new world.

Theory of Water is a resonant exploration of an intricate, multi-layered relationship with the most abundant element on our planet—one that, as Simpson eloquently shows, is shaping our present even as it demands a radical rethinking of how we might achieve a just future.

Alain Brossat est ex-militant de la LCR ancré dans une lecture anti-impérialiste de la politique. Houria Bouteldja est la cofondatrice du QG Décolonial et une figure de l'antiracisme politique. Dans cet entretien exigeant, les deux penseur·ses et militant·es clarifient leurs divergences et leurs convergences autour de la religion, du racisme, de l'État, du fascisme et de l'impérialisme. Alors que ces questions clivent celles et ceux qui luttent pour l'émancipation, rendant parfois les discussions impossibles, les deux auteur·ices reviennent sur leurs parcours politiques et philosophiques, sans pour autant feindre le consensus de leurs héritages politiques. Entretien coordonné par Marianne VL Koplewicz.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.

Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.

An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.

Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died. ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Introduction by Chris Kraus
Afterword by Susan Faludi

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural resonance, offers as an entry point to imagine ways in which the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats  invites the audience to consider how dance and choreographic thinking can serve as tools for envisioning alternative futures, where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities.