Books

The Convent of Pleasure is a play written by Margaret Cavendish in 1668. The play is a comedy about noblewomen who choose to retreat to a convent to create their own community in order to avoid the constraints and pains of marriage and men. Lady Happy, the main protagonist, ponders the question of a radical alternative to marriage: “But why may not I love a woman with the same affection I could a man?” This book is a close reproduction of the first printed edition of the play, which was supervised and edited by hand by Cavendish.

Computers at Work presents an overview of the role women played in the building and shaping of the computing field from the 18th century to the present day. It aims to articulate in what way women’s systematic erasure from history has transformed computing from being perceived as “women’s work” to an industry that is largely hostile to them.

Vice Versa is on of the first known lesbian magazine in the world. Lisa Ben wrote, edited, printed and distributed the magazine for nine months in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. This publication gathers the nine issues she has published.

Lisa Ben explained in an interview: "I would type it out during working hours. I had never enough work—I was a fast typist. And my boss would say: 'Well, I don't care what you do if your work is done. But I don't want you to there and knit or read a magazine... I want you to look busy.' So I had plenty to keep me busy and that's how I put together VICE VERSA... I used the office stapling machine. I used the manila folders form the office, and I didn't feel a bit guilty about it! I should have, but I didn't."

Enlevés à Bougie is a visual archive compiling documents from the kidnapping of a French state employee during the War of Independence, in 1960, Bougie, Algeria.

Au départ, une simple anecdote: un gabion de chasse typique des marais normands se détache de son ancrage pour dériver dans l’Océan Atlantique, avec des chasseurs incapables de nager à son bord. Théo Robine-Langlois transpose cette histoire à une échelle interstellaire: le Gabion, vaisseau spatial chasseur d’astéroïdes conçu pour être attaché à la Terre, dérive dans l’espace. À la suite d’Anton, on traverse les différentes communautés qui peuplent le bâtiment, monde en soi où se côtoient et s’affrontent des mœurs, des modèles de société, et surtout des formes de langage. Anton, lui, tente d’échapper à celui qui prétend régir le vaisseau, en récoltant des photocopies éparpillées dans ses méandres, jusqu’à son mystérieux cœur...

Empruntant au roman d’apprentissage autant qu’à la science-fiction, Le Gabion est aussi une chanson de geste: une odyssée symbolique où la langue et la figure de l’auteur sont traités de manière expérimentale, comme faisant partie du récit lui-même. Les langues que parlent les personnages contaminent le livre, qui se construit comme un montage où poésie, philosophie, histoire littéraire, hip hop et échanges SMS se rejoignent. En parcourant le Gabion, les lecteur.trice.s rencontrent différents rapports au langage, qui se concrétisent à la fin du livre par l’élection d’un maire de banlieue parisienne.

Le Gabion poursuit le travail entamé par Théo Robine-Langlois dans son premier livre, [...], où le subterfuge typographique des points de suspension entre crochets signifiait à la fois l’existence de trous dans la langue, d’échappatoires dans l’imaginaire, et de nuages dans le ciel. Dans Le Gabion, on peut se cacher dans un paragraphe, lire entre les lignes d’un manuel de photocopieuse, se battre avec des missiles-poèmes, rencontrer des enfants sanguinaires et des sororités féministes. On traverse également plusieurs siècles de poésie française, des troubadours à Henri Chopin ou Hélène Bessette.

Texte en Français

Yesterday as they smoked, a cigarette butt leaked and burned
their delicately stitched summertime pyjamas. A round hole
on their torso reminded the holes drilled in the wall the day
before to ventilate their room.

Trompette gathers three short texts by Soto Labor, along with their beautiful drawings, that tell about magnificient animals who observe and eat the world. 
Bilingual, French & English.

Trois courts textes de Soto Labor, accompagnés de ses dessins, où des animaux magnifiques observent et mangent le monde. 
Bilingue français/anglais.

The Presage Pamphlet Series welcomes new, shorter and more portable text formats, printed in-house (it’s cheap & chic!).

'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.

Publishing as Practice centers on the work of three contemporary artists/book publishers who have developed fresh ways of broaching the political in publishing. 

This book documents a residency program at Ulises—a curatorial platform based in Philadelphia—that explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice. Over the course of two years, three participants (Hardworking Goodlooking, Martine Syms/Dominica, and Bidoun) activated Ulises as an exhibition space and public programming hub, engaging the public through workshops, discussions, and projects. 

Hardworking Goodlooking is a design and publishing imprint working primarily out of the Philippines. Dominica is an imprint run by artist Martine Syms dedicated to exploring Blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. Bidoun, a non-profit organization and magazine, focuses on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas. Each organization approached their residency at Ulises in a unique way, bringing a new understanding of what it means to practice publishing. 

Edited by Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, and Ricky Yanas, Publishing as Practice features a preface by David Senior, Head of Library and Archives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Ulises Carrión’s 1975 publishing manifesto “The New Art of Making Books.” Publishing as Practice also includes writing from Clara Balaguer, Hardworking Goodlooking, Martine Syms/Dominica, Bidoun, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, and Gee Wesley alongside interviews, excerpts, and documentation from each residency. 

The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson's research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust's Á la recherche du temps perdu.

An intimate, urgent and riotous account of masculinity, whiteness, queerness and belief in America.

In winter 2018, Gregg Bordowitz performed a three-part lecture series at the New Museum as part of Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Each evening, he explored an avatar of masculinity that was formative to him as he came of age as an outer-borough child of Jewish immigrants, then as an artist-activist in Manhattan at the dawn of the AIDS crisis: the rock star, the rabbi and the comedian. He merged personal and political history, ribald humor and social criticism, performer and persona.

Some Styles of Masculinity is a self-portrait and an essay on upheaval and plague, based on transcripts of the eponymous series, which Bordowitz has reimagined for the page. He asserts that gender can't be separated from ethnicity, sexuality, class or nationality, and he connects these aspects of himself through personal anecdotes as well as reflections on whiteness, diaspora, comedy and Jewish mysticism. Some Styles of Masculinity evokes David Antin's "talk poems," Maggie Nelson's "autotheory," David France's How to Survive a Plague and Wayne Koestenbaum's casually erudite criticism. This book is a winding, intimate, urgent, freewheeling account of thinking and enduring in difficult times.

Gregg Bordowitz (born 1964) is the author of Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018), General Idea: Imagevirus (Afterall Books, 2010) and The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (2004). He was an early participant in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), where he cofounded several video collectives.

"In Eileen Myles's newest book of poetry, Evolution, we encounter an arrival, a voice always becoming, unpinnable and queer. Myles's new poems are transformations, and perhaps a culmination of the poet's previous inquiries into love, gender, poetry, America, and its politics . . . The form of Myles's work rivals its subject matter in intimacy. The lines in Evolution are physical, a body unleashed but not yet comfortable and not without fear. The short lines rush down the page, movement as touch, touch as freedom." — Natalie Diaz, New York Times Book Review

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation, and the debut of an important new social critic.

How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities, how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of "human" depends on its difference from "animal"?  

Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled, and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics."  

Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring, whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals, Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice. 

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of autotheory offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and family. An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

“Reading Room: meeting the universe halfway is a book – a collection of five booklets – that came out of a multi-sensory project created by Harriet Plewis that attempted to make sense of a key text by theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad.

The volume contains a booklet describing the ideas, experiments and practices of expanded reading in reference to Barad’s text, and the remaining four booklets are workbooks, or manuals, to help people replicate or expand on the ideas themselves. The books were produced by the artist in collaboration with Sam Whetton and Chery Styles.”

5x A5 booklets, All black & white digitally printed, 4x saddle stitched 1x perfect bound. Comes sandwiched between embossed card.

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.

Gender, voice, language, and identity in musical composition and experimental sound practices.

How do we get to imagine the music we make? Where and how is it grounded? What is the relationship between the art and its maker, and what and who does music represent? Gender, voice, language, and identity are four important notions for musical creation, for the shaping of a canon, and for the interactions in the field. All four notions are strongly contextual and carry an inherent sense of paradigm and otherness. Other and self are defined via orientation and history, expressed via voice, and confirmed in language. 
In this publication, these four core notions serve as a set of lenses permitting different perspectives on one another. However much the field of the sounding arts might pretend to be tangential to such affections, they provide important grounds for musical creation. 

Some twenty artists have created a variety of outputs—as different in form, strategies, approach, and language, as they are rooted in a variety of sub-fields within the sounding arts.

Contributions by AGF aka Antye Greie, Andrea Parkins, Aurélie Lierman, Bonnie Jones, Cathy Lane, Electric Indigo aka Susanne Kirchmayr, Felicity Ford, Heimo Lattner, Jaume Ferrete Vázquez, Judith Laub, Julia Eckhardt, Marc Matter, Marijs Boulogne, Marion Wasserbauer, Myriam Van Imschoot, Pali Meursault, Peter Westenberg, Richard Scott, Romy Rüegger, Susan McClary, Suzanne Thorpe.

A brilliant novella from a legendary figure in American fiction.

A young woman drifts through dimly lit bars and rented rooms, reporting from the erogenous zones of New York and Europe. Encountering increasingly bizarre sexual situations, she turns her curious, comic, and fierce eye onto the contemporary world of sex and desire.

The men of this world evade and simper, they prey, preen, and fall hopelessly in love. In the narrator’s deadpan portraits, we see young women indulging their freedom through hope and disappointment, and young men wearing various guises of masculinity.

This novella surprises with unlikely fucks, disturbing fucks, outlandish fucks, and some truly weird fucks – all written with the smart, elegant, and tough style which could only be that of Lynne Tillman.

This book, from inter-genre, bilingual writer Nathanaël, investigates the relationship between image and language through a philosophical and poetic meditation on a self-portrait by Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun.

"In Absence Where As, Nathanael reads the unread book, ‘the book that comes’ to us nevertheless, that haunts and hovers unopened and dreamt, proceeding from the Ecrits of the visionary and revolutionary artist-activist Claude Cahun, to life’s library. Through this constellatory essay in the faults of thought, in reading’s flaw, Nathanael comes to know and know how, creating new epistemological and aesthetic territory in the radiant continuum between lyric and narrative, the text and the dream of text, which is literature itself." - John Keene

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, June Jordan’s generous body of poetry is distilled and curated to represent the very best of her works.

Written over the span of several decades―from Some Changes in 1971 to Last Poems in 2001­―Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including racist police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized or outside of the norm. In these poems of great immediacy and radical kindness, humor and embodied candor, readers will (re)discover a voice that has inspired generations of contemporary poets to write their truths. June Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.

A look back in text and images at AA Bronson 's (collective) production between 2013 and 2018.

A nocturnal secret ritual performed by two naked men in a hotel room in the Netherlands; a woven tent where the artist dressed as a mage encounters visitors to share their traumas; buttplugs adorned with rooster feathers; a collection of queer zines; anal-sprayed tartan paintings; a zen garden of mugwort. A few of the singular artistic gestures AA Bronson committed in the last few years are united in this book.

After his General Idea partners, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, passed away in 1994, AA Bronson had to learn how to keep on living by himself, inventing a personal identity without his former companions, creating a new community of work, friendship and love. These issues have been at the core of his art in the last 25 years. He has developed a work where collaboration with other artists, especially younger queer artists, and creation of a social bond are central.

AA Bronson's House of Shame aims to emphasize this social dimension in his work through an overview of a series of exhibitions he made between 2013 and 2018. These are shows that bring together a community of artists; shows where performances and rituals, often invisible, contribute to the creation of a shared experience; a unique blend of art, friendship, collaboration, spirituality and humour.

The book is in two-parts. An initial monographic section, which includes an essay and an interview with the artist, brings together the works and the exhibitions. In the second, choral part, friends have been invited to bear witness and write a sort of 'journal de bord,' telling the tale of five years of the artist's community life.

With a foreword by Vincent Simon, a text by Paul Clinton, and an interview by Frédéric Bonnet, and contributions from Philip Aarons, Defne Ayas, Elijah Burger, Matthias Herrmann, Richard John Jones, Bradford Kessler, Terence Koh, Sholem Krishtalka, Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Gareth Long, Chrysanne Stathacos, Scott Treleaven, and Louwrien Wijers.

A series of recent drawings by London-based artist Faye Wei Wei.

Faye Wei Wei (born 1994) is a British artist. She has had solo shows at Project Room, Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna (2020), Cob Gallery, London (2019), SADE Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2018)... She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2016. She lives and works in London.

An in-depth research project by Elena Mazzi in dialogue with the Mapuche spiritual leader, silversmith and activist, Mauro Millán and Argentinean artist, Eduardo Molinari, about the cultural resistance of the Mapuche people to neo-colonialism in Chile.

Curated by Emanuele Guidi, is promoted by ar/ge kunst Bolzano, and supported by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019)–Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, Silver Rights focuses on the ancestral bond between the communities and the land (mapu), a bond eroded and denied by colonising forces that have mutated over the centuries to gradually establish themselves in recent decades through neo-extractivist practices; a settlement process resulting from the convergence of investment policies and commercial agreements between South American governments and foreign multinationals, including the Italian Benetton.

More specifically, the project responds to the narrative proposed by the Leleque Museum, an anthropological museum opened in 2000 in the very lands owned by Benetton; an ambiguous operation that dismisses the Mapuche people as an extinct culture rather than one that is alive and active in the disputed territory, 'musealising' their memory and material culture. Elena Mazzi addresses this complexity by engaging in dialogue with the dense network of relations that the Mapuche community has been consciously weaving for years; a way of understanding the art of diplomacy that, on the one hand, implies building and maintaining international relations between different political and cultural subjects, and, on the other, is implemented in their cosmovisions as a form of radical mediation between land, human and 'more than human' beings.

Contributions by Leandro Martínez Depietri, Riccardo Bottazzo, Enrica Camporesi, Emanuele Guidi, Elena Mazzi, Mauro Millán, Eduardo Molinari, Ana Margarita Ramos, Ya Basta! Êdî Bese!

published in September 2021
 
trilingual edition (English / Spanish / Italian)