Artists' Writing

CHOREOGRAPHY/KOREOGRAFI is an anthology published in three editions, consisting of texts written by artists active within the field of dance and choreography in the Nordic countries.

With the anthology we wish to build a rich and complex understanding of what choreography is and can be. We approach choreography as its own field of knowledge, and try to reach out and contribute to a larger Nordic disciplinary community. Our ambition is to protect a space for reflection that we experience as threatened, that is to say the thinking from and around the artistic works and practices.

Each contribution is build around a specific issue requested by the editors and developed in dialogue with the contributors, there are independent texts as well as conversations and interviews. All texts exist in both Scandinavian and English versions. We have curated the texts we’ve been missing and the conversations we have dreamt of reading.

The anthology is edited and published independently by artists based in Oslo. The first edition was launched in May 2016 and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Ann-Christin Kongsness and writer Runa Borch Skolseg. The second edition was launched in October 2018 and edited by Solveig Styve Holte, Ann-Christin Kongsness and Venke Marie Sortland. The third edition was launched in September 2021, and edited by Holte, Kongsness and Sortland as well, all three of us work as dancers, choreographers and writers. Helge Hjort Bentsen is behind the graphic design for the first and second edition, Kim Hiorthøy did the graphic design for the third edition.

The third and last edition of CHOREOGRAPHY consists of eight newly written texts. The anthology still has a Nordic focus, but this time we have decided to go deeper into certain issues, regardless of geographical context. In this edition we also have a stronger interdisciplinary focus, in addition to following up some threads from the two former editions; marginal perspectives with a base in feminist, queer and post-colonial traditions, form experiments that explore text as an extended choreographic practice, texts by and about and as collectives, how to make artistic research available and how the infrastructures that we depend on influences our artistic practices and vice versa.

The contributors for the third edition are Sigrid Øvreås Svendal, Ingri Midgard Fiksdal, Kristine, Tjøgersen, Chloe Chignell, Hanna Järvinen, Goro Tronsmo, Solveig Styve Holte, Roza Moshtaghi and Karen Eide Bøen.

CHOREOGRAPHY (2021) is supported by Arts Council Norway.

Revue du Master de Textes et de Création Littéraire de la Cambre*

Avec les textes de: Sam Bouffandeau, Chloé Clemens, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Robin Faymonville, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Adèle Goardet, Bastien Hauser, Giulia Lazzara, Cyprien Muth, Sephora Shebabo.

* Le Master en Textes et Création Littéraire de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre propose un programme de formation aux étudiants qui visent à faire des métiers du texte et de la création littéraire leur avenir professionnel. Il s’adresse principalement aux jeunes écrivains et, plus généralement, à l’étudiant qui souhaite professionnaliser sa démarche artistique en lien avec la pratique de l’écrit en la confrontant à d’autres écrivains, à des éditeurs et à des professionnels reconnus de la littérature, l’informer et l’enrichir de nouveaux savoirs et de nouvelles compétences. Considérant le travail du texte et ses différentes formes comme des expressions majeures de l’homme à travers l’histoire, et les littératures des différents continents comme un art à part entière dans le champ des pratiques artistiques contemporaines, ce Master s’inscrit dans une démarche ouverte de production, de réflexion et d’instruction de l’écrit dans un monde en devenir.

With 2+2=5, George Orwell's flawed masterpiece finally receives a much-needed rectification, as Jake Chapman takes us on a bad trip into an atrocious alt-Eurasia - a nightmare utopia of 24/7 self-expression, mandatory wellbeing, yogic breathing, and promiscuous empathy. Yippie wonks in open-toed sandals have ejected the evil capitalist overlords, compassion and charity reign supreme, buckwheat salad and artisan cashew cheese are in plentiful supply, and all strive to live their best life, all the time.  

Employed by the Ministry to rectify misfortunes issuing from a curious glitch in the system, Winston Smith finds that his creative urges are unexpectedly awoken, and he is driven to express his deepest place, voice, and hurt through the medium of poetry. But what connects Winston's furtive scribblings in My Big Book of Me to the unpleasantnesses emanating from the deep glitch? Is Julia really the perfect kooky carefree soulmate she seems to be? Can O'Brien be trusted? And when does the new season of Big Brother start?  

An all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink, Chapman's twisted vision is a bracing reminder that dystopia is just wishful thinking, and that the worst can always get worster.

Auditing Intimacy is a collection of postal correspondence, photographs and declassified documents produced by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly between 2015 and 2020 under the banner of their shared practice The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. In a spirit of transparency and full disclosure, the publication contains a certified, independent and critical audit of the practice by Alicja Melzacka. The project was undertaken to commemorate the fifth anniversary of O.J.A.I.

Edited by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Artworks by Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly
Essay by Alicja Melzacka
Design by Zero Desk
Documentation by Pauline Miko
Published by Fantôme Verlag
174 pages

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE). The work is fuelled by a recurring obsession with architecture, infrastructure, finance,  institutional power and DIY ritualism. O.J.A.I. pursues a strategy of self-institutionalisation where tools and codified rules of engagement are appropriated from economic and political infrastructures for the purposes of structuring intimacy and conjuring autonomy.

I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identi­fication devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men­: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Afterword by Susana Torre
Edited by Jeff Khonsary

A quarterly print journal publishing new writing and artworks with a focus on practices that work between disciplines and against type. There is always a third thing between two things that are known; we are interested in whatever there is between translations/transitions, things-in-progress, converging genres, methods of excavation and formal innovation. The purpose of the journal is to provide a test site for ideas and research; a space for experimental modes and new prototypes.

The second issue of Fieldnotes contains new work by:

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Steve Dutton
Liesl Ujvary
Akio Yuguchi
Evan Lavender-Smith
Dodie Bellamy
Paul Maheke & Giles Bailey
Yan Jun
Emily Charlton
Ed Atkins
Sam Buchan-Watts
Elizabeth Price
Mary Mussman
Carolyn Ferrucci
Hanne Lippard
Charlie Godet Thomas
Hannah Regel

A new version of After 8 Books' first publication and bestseller: Evelyn’s adventures as a transgender masseuse in Amsterdam, back when she was a young artist, supporting herself by working in a massage salon. The texts are witty, sharp and thoughtful, reflecting a very specific community of friends and coworkers and its counterpart, the male clientele. The drawings illustrating those texts are dreamlike watercolors, perfect companions to Unintended Experience’s diaristic journey.

'You have within you something stronger and more numinous' by Margarita Maximova is a collection of extracts of letters sent to her by her mother over the course of ten years.

Saliva est le résultat d'une résidence collaborative en octobre 2021 à Fructôse, Dunkerque.

Édition de 100 exemplaires.

Deleuzine: A Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

With contributions by: Egle Ambrasaite, Alex Aspden, Edoardo Biscossi, Sabeen Chaudhry, Ruby Conner, Genevieve Costello, Andrew Culp, Anna Luisa Di Lauro, Sophie Fitze, Roxman Gatt, Helena Grande, Rose Higham-Stainton, Sevana Holst, Patrick McAlindon, Geiste Kincinaityte, Michele Muraca, Holly Rowley, Katie Shannon, Natalie Stypa, Katarina Sylvan, Elaine Tam, Haydée Touitou, Samuel White, Romy Day Winkel.

Edited by: Lilly Marks, Sabeen Chaudhry and Holly Rowley.

Curatorial Feelings is a book that collects arts practitioner Eloise Sweetman’s writing from the past decade — written on the occasion of exhibitions she curated, written on and for individual artworks, as well as for public talks.

Sweetman often wrote while, and not before, the artworks were on view. The time of retrospection, and of being with artworks, imbues her language. Moving between prose and poetry, impressions and reflections, coursing through the writing is a commitment to senses, to subjectivity, to social responsibility.

Sweetman’s writing contributes to a genre of curators’ writing that takes things to heart, that takes things personally. Calling out her ‘curatorial feelings’ juxtaposes and unites the two modes of engagement: as a curator and as a sentient being. Curatorial feelings foreground subjectivity, intuition, senses, and belief systems, while pushing for new art historical narratives and an ethical professionalism

Romance Utopia is a research project is both a digital archive, a radioshow, a videowork and a collection of essays around notions of romance.

Second volume of Ion Grigorescu's translated diaries, assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

In recent years, the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of the seminal Eastern European visual artists of his generation, has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014 by Sternberg Press—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979. It not only counters the facile reading of Grigorescu's practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance art, but provides insight into the artist's multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, an analysis of subjectivity, and a penetrating gaze into a dialectic of secrecy and elucidation, of exposure and mystification.

Grigorescu's diaries are written notes revolving around the status of the image and investigate the relation of the body to society and of art to the world through a phenomenological approach. His work proposes a parallel conception of the public made tangible through the eloquence of the body.

In poetic language full of powerfully pictorial metaphors, Grigorescu's reflects on the tension between the realistic effects of the image, the suppression of realism, and the hidden traces the gaze holds through the activities of the increasingly present unconscious of collective memory. Along with the drawings, paintings, photographs, and sketches that accompany them, the diaries serve as an introduction that open the possibility of conceiving Grigorescu's art as a rare evocation of a singular way of thinking: a stance.

Ion Grigorescu (born 1945, lives and works in Bucarest) is one of the most emblematic artistic personalities of the post-war period in Romania, a key figure of conceptual artin Eastern Europe.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn. Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

40 p, ills colour & bw, 13 x 21 cm, pb, English

fanta for the ghosts by Elisabeth Molin

2021, English
46 pages, 120mm x 210mm
edition of 500

Co-published with OneThousandBooks and Elisabeth Molin

First published in France in 2013, My Mother Laughs is the final book written by the legendary and beloved Belgian artist and director Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) before her death. A moving and unforgettable memoir, the book delves deeply into one of the central themes and focuses of Akerman's often autobiographical films: her mother, who was the direct subject of her final film No Home Movie (2015).

With a particular focus on the difficulties Akerman faced in conjunction with the end of her mother's life, the book combines a matter-of-fact writing style with family photographs and stills from her own films in order to better convey the totality of her experience. Akerman writes: With pride because I finally believed in my ability to say something that I'd had trouble saying. I told myself, I am strong for once, I speak. I tell the truth.  

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist and professor. She is best known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was dubbed a masterpiece by the New York Times. During her 42 years of active filmmaking, Akerman's influence on queer, feminist and avant-garde cinema remains unmatched, her films highlighting a near-physical passage of time. Akerman's films have been shown at the Venice Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among many others.

Translated by Corina Copp.

Published June 2019. 

"She has fallen forward again, resting there like a reptile basking in the January sun. Where she was, in her corner, temperatures rose up to 28 degrees Celsuis. Her dry skin darkened, drinking the light."

In 2020, CMMC –Céline Mathieu and Myrthe van der Mark– were invited by organisers NICC Lodgers to perform at M HKA in Antwerp in response to art subsidy cuts in Flanders. Their contribution, The Writing Performance, was an attempt to write a novella each in three days, during the museum’s opening hours and in full sight of visitors. Throughout The Writing Performance, CMMC subsisted on water and sugar.

Published 2021.

The book (DE/EN) gathers a selection of five short stories and two poems written between 2018 – 2021 by Benedikt Bock. 

1st edition (400)
Copy editing German original: Frederike Niebuhr (linguistic services)
Translation and Proofreading: Good and Cheap Translators

A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.

Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.

A collage/text exploration of the overlap between healing, fiction, memory and ritual.

London-based Chinese Malaysian multidisciplinary producer and DJ Flora Yin-Wong presents her first book, Liturgy, a journey into the uncanny realm of the senses. Divided into nine chapters, the book delves deep into histories of healing and intuition. Reflecting the multilayered tonality of Yin-Wong's music, which often draws on field recordings and dissonant sounds, it interweaves textual and visual collage, divining inspiration from meditation, oracles, curses, divination, hexagrams and superstitions. Much like her music, which has been described as containing aural snapshots of places and sensations, Yin-Wong's Liturgy comprises a multitude of mediums. Reflected here is not only the multidisciplinary artist's approach to sound, but also her interest in the connection between fiction, memory, rituals and incantation.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist 'differently' through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the insitution's curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Het experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of 'performance'.

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

Where Do You Draw The Line Between Art and Politics? consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflections and motivational support, the publication focuses on the experiences, commitments, and feelings that animate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces both within and outside of art institutions; a repository designed to inspire and enourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics. 

Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018).

Lilith, Losing, Lavender: A love letter to love, is a publication based on stretching the subjectivities in love from the formulation I love You, as a way of seeing what is under the gaze of western romantic ideas and heteropatriarchal structures that may reveal problems in language about love.

It gathers a collection of texts written throughout the artistic research trajectory of Andrea Zavala Folache. With different narrative styles as diary, love letters, score instructions, this collection imbricates ideas of love, art and life as an essay about conditions of attachment.

In the interstice of several practices as dance, writing and drawing and different spaces as the dance studio, the atelier, the classroom, the theatre and the white cube, Andrea’s research focuses on non chronological dramaturgies for the emergence of surprise or unexpectedness.

Published 2021.