Protoplasmic Flow

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

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.

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 manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and associative suite of fragments on the evocations of background noise when brought to the fore.

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat is a rich, meditative ecotone of ideas; a nimble and associative work of essayism that aims to map a reticulated cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner, and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari, a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.

Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates' fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE); the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water…

All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.

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.