Essays

Being Together Precedes Being offers a text book for the project “The Kids Want Communism,” which was initiated towards the 99th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution of October 1917 as a series of exhibitions, symposiums and conferences, screening programs, publications and a summer camp. In this textbook, communism does not merely describe an “us versus them” relation, but also offers that we are becoming the future. This trajectory of communism runs parallel to us at every single moment and its guiding principle is that being together precedes being.

Sowing Somankidi Coura. A Generative Archive is a long-term research endeavor by Raphaël Grisey in collaboration with Bouba Touré around the permacultures and archives of Somankidi Coura, a self-organized cooperative along the Senegal river founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977 after the Sahel drought of 1973.

The book assembles texts, voices, images, takes, retakes and research around the Pan-African history of the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, the liberation struggles of migrant workers and farmers in France and West Africa. It enables thinking a politics of decolonisation for agriculture, migration, care, soil and the archive.

Presented as the blueprints for three public lectures, We are behind proposes alternative routes through Emily Wardill’s work and represents three different attempts at embodying and dissembling knowledge. Using different formal textual devices, from which they also deviate – a standard lecture, the subject of which becomes something felt, not taught; an a-chronological conversation; and the transcript of a play rendered as a formal essay – each section describes the different facets of an ongoing dialogue between the authors. Fragmented not only by dialogic turns, appropriated texts, images, a score and quotations, and containing extensive reproductions of Wardill’s work, the book’s content and design reflects the labyrinthine, and sometimes hallucinogenic quality of her films and their radical combination of form, content and idea.

Each section focuses on specific works. Section One, The Object, uses The Diamond (Descartes Daughter), SEA OAK, and Gamekeepers without Game, to explore ideas of the rational, public art, the public, linguistic framing and the irrational, via Gladys Knight and the Pips, a hand-drawn hallucinogenic section, Seth Price’s essay Dispersion, Norman Mailer, The Rockridge Institute and Peter Gidal. Section Two, The Window follows a conversations between the authors, that opens onto desire, politics, mirrors, and the films Basking in what feels like ‘An Ocean of Grace’ I soon realise that I am not looking at it but rather, I AM it, recognising myself, Split the View in Two (Part Two), and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck. In the final part, The Theatre, an apparently formal essay on the implications of framing live action, the proscenium arch as a link between theatre and cinema, Dan Graham, perspective, power and its collapse, transforms into a collection of dialogues around Ben, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, authenticity, reality and fiction.

NILLING: PROSE is a sequence of five loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

"I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love."

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.

Mettant au travail un concept esquissé par la théoricienne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (qui opère la distinction entre lecture paranoïaque et lecture réparatrice, cette dernière refusant de séparer le blanc des faits du jaune de l’imagination), ce livre se soutient d’une conviction : lorsqu’elle entend partir de la non-effectivité sexe-genre pour libérer, non seulement notre manière d’envisager les identités sexuelles, mais bien la façon de penser le monde, la théorie queer communique avec de multiples avancées parallèles qui, dans les sciences sociales et la philosophie contemporaines, entendent de même se frayer un chemin à travers les clivages et les dualismes entre nature et culture, corps et esprit, monde imaginaire et monde réel, individu et communauté.

Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.

Edited by Alice Brooke, Giulia Smith & Rózsa Farkas