Spring Brakers

Words gathered from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986), Natural Enemies of Books (MMS, 2020), Non credere di avere dei diritti (Libreria delle donne di Milano, 1987), Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto (Francis Picabia, 1920) and WITCH (Rebecca Tamás, 2019). A first version of this poem/pamphlet was made in the context of See What I Mean, a workshop by Phil Baber at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, october 2024.

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

“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.

Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. 

Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ‘80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

Editor: Ananth Shastri
Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine Appendix #3 Orality includes contributions by Simon Asencio, Bruno De Wachter, Peter Szendy, Clara Amaral, Itziar Okariz, Jude Joseph, Léa Poiré and Mette Edvardsen.

Time has The Appendixes #1–4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that developed 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 this 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 their 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.

The Appendixes are organized around four themes: (1) The gesture of writing, (2) How to organize a library, (3) Orality and (4) Translation. In addition to being published on paper, the editorial series also consisted of other formats of presentations, exchanges and meetings organized as workshops, fieldwork, performances, conferences, collective readings and oral publications, taking place during their residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and in the vicinity.

The Appendixes is the work that continues, material that adds on, some of it perhaps too long or too detailed, unfit or unfinished. The four themes that their research is formulated around originate in specific experiences and questions from the practices of Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine (2010 – ongoing), and also the large publication on the project ‘A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books’ (2019). The research was both a means of exploring these themes in greater depth and also of bringing them into contact with other artists and researchers working on similar or related subjects. The Appendixes offered them both the contexts and the pretexts for things to happen (in time, in space, on paper).

The Appendixes #1–4, published in these cahiers, do not present an overview or a summary of all of the activities and presentations that took place during the two years at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. What these cahiers offer is a space in which to hold some thoughts together and to share them in this form. It is one more step along the way, extending the research and work already begun and that will now continue.