Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

Homophone Dictionary was originally a file that is compiled by the now 96-year-old former schoolteacher Susan Nixon. She has build up many collections throughout her life, almost all of them exist out of objects, except one: after her retirement she compiled a word document that by now exist out of almost 1000 homophones; two, or more words that you pronounce similar but have a different meaning, often the spelling is also different.

The document is structured as a dictionary and the homophones are illustrated with examples that are based on autobiographical information. The structure of Homophone Dictionary also refers to speech therapy exercises and concrete poetry.

“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’

I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”

Offset print
20,4 × 12,4 cm
edition of 500

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

This issue, "Spin Cycle", is concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.

In This is NOT what I want to tell you: she looks at the many attacks carried out by teenagers in Palestine in 2015 and 2016. The teens, all children aged between 10 and 15, were shot dead or sentenced to years in prison. The series of almost daily knife attacks by these lone wolves reflected the hopelessness and despair among the young people of Palestine. They wanted to send a message to the world, but were unable to convey this in ordinary language.

In Two Ladybugs the fates of three characters, a Belgian woman, a Palestinian girl and an Israeli soldier, are closely intertwined. The players don't feel comfortable in this new, strange world and they don't hide that from the public.

Broken Shapes: A young woman in a city that has been occupied for decades, on the day of her father’s funeral, discovers his architectural drawings. Overcome with grief, she slips into the dream worlds and imagined places that he created.

Rimah Jabr Rimah Jabr (Nablus, Palestine, 1980) is a theatre director, playwright, screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. She completed a master’s degree in theatre-making from the RITCS in Brussels. She wrote and directed several plays produced in Belgium, Canada, and Palestine. She actively collaborates with visual artists to craft unique performances. Her doctoral research is a performance ethnography research-creation with Palestinian Designers from Hebron, examining the impact of confinement on the creative process involved in set design. Broken Shapes is a collaborative project co-created by Toronto-based theatremaker Rimah Jabr and Brussels-based visual artist Dareen Abbas.

Issue 04, Structure, traces the scaffolding of our lives, seen and unseen. We travel from the palaces of Versailles to the basements of Russian resistance, from origami folds to mechanized labor, from cosmic geometry to the twitch of a stimming hand. These are the choreographies that hold us, train us, divide us, and sometimes set us free. This issue moves through power's choreography with Vinícius Portella tracing repression from TikTok algorithms to Candomblé persecution, Sasha Portyannikova documenting dance as survival under Russian authoritarianism, and Ellen Jeffrey revealing how stimming becomes its own radical dance practice. Mariam Ala-Rashi finds cosmic alignment in contortion while Michael O'Connor explores the body as origami, structure folded into self. Katja Vaghi contrasts baroque precision with contemporary chaos, and Nathaniel Moore exposes the market forces shaping European dance. Cover and insert artist, Maria Harfouche, captures structure through double-exposed analog photography and layered compositions that reveal how moments build upon each other.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice. 

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.