Books

Alex Farrar’s book Wimper (the Dutch term for eyelash, or a potential misspelling of the English for ‘whimper’) presently held by the reader is an extension of an exhibition, which may be experienced in its own right, after the space has been vacated. It operates on the limits of material evidence by reprising a series of earlier prints entitled Behavioural Residues (second sweep), featuring barely perceptible images of single eyelashes spread throughout the texts and pages. Apart from their significance as intimate materials discarded by the body over time, such as hair or skin, they submit to the almost nothing of an aesthetics of disappearance, while lingering in a dialectics of misunderstanding that commits to a lack of closure.

Texts by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley, and David Price. Graphic design by studio Hendriksen, risograph printed by Alex Farrar in studio Hendriksen, Amsterdam, with the cover offset printed by ZwaanLenoirSchuring and bound by AGIA (The Netherlands) in a print run of 300 copies.

Love is love, but not really. To recognise love as love we need comprehensible images. What are those contemporary images that help us identify love and how could we identify love differently, figuring it as less defined by safety procedures, measured commitment and feelings of ownership and entitlement? Playing Monogamy refuses to see personal relationships as safe havens where people can hide from the precarities of society, and instead proposes to make public life more intimate and romantic. 

Through a contemporary rereading of the cult of monogamy, van Saarloos playfully queers the way in which the structure of monogamy is upheld through social convention within Western contexts. Written for more of a lay audience, the book proposes an expanded and polyamorous engagement with intimacy and sexuality as a possible alternative. Originally written in Dutch and published by De Bezige Bij, Publication Studio is excited to bring this book to an English speaking audience for the very first time.  

Translated by Liz Waters, it includes a foreword by Leni Zumas, author of the US bestseller Red Clocks, and a revised preface by Simon(e) herself, addressing how she might approach writing about nonmonogamy differently four years after the book's first publication—and after many experiences in between.

One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris ... This is the legend of a she-dandy's life. Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson's first novel.

'As far as I'm concerned, it's already a classic.' - Anne Boyer

Companion reader for Under Current, an exhibition and film by Alice dos Reis. With 'Blue Carbon' by Holly Childs, 'Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water' by Astrida Neimanis, 'King Tide' by Sophia Al-Maria, 'Notes on a Dotted Red Wave' by Danea Io, 'Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering' by Bogna M. Konior, 'To a Current's Ear' by Alice dos Reis and more. Bilingual edition (Spanish-English).

MxT, or ‘Memory x Time,’ is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over like an old coin, by invoking other poets, by appropriating the language of technology, of instruction, of diagram, of electrical engineering, and of elegy itself.

the project - a project about love and intimacy. 'It is a method that touches on (or rather, crashes into) some (artistic) ‘taboo’s’, surrounding the ways in which the autobiographical, one’s intimate life and those who partake in that, can and ought to be dealt with within one’s artistic work. She ‘gets away with it’ and I think the reason for that is that she doesn’t try to spare herself or seek a safety zone, nor does she shun her artistic, author’s responsibility: she is constantly both in the middle of the sticky hot soup in which she is cooking her research and she doing the stirring, the spicing and the serving.' - Philippine Hoegen

In We Speak Silent, an opus of the quirky relationships between people and their words, Hannah Weiner becomes the vessel for the emotional spectrum of the human comedy. It is a continuing adventure in language. Hannah Weiner is also the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including The Code Poems, Clairvoyant Journal, and Little Books/ Indians.

Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological movements: all look at the body as a ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a signifier for the reproduction crisis generated by the neoliberal turn in capitalist development and for the international surge in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and bestselling author Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body into a work-machine, expanding on one of the main subjects of her first book, Caliban and the Witch. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects.

This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow's Theatrum Botanicum (2015-18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses "botanical nationalism" and "flower diplomacy" during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Night Philosophy is collected around the figure of the child, the figure of the child not just as a little person under the tutelage of adults, but also the submerged one, who knows, who is without power, who doesn’t matter. The book proposes a minor politics that disperses all concentrations of power. Fanny Howe chronicles the weak and persistent, those who never assimilate at the cost of having another group to dominate. She explores the dynamics of the child as victim in a desensitized era, when transgression is the zeitgeist and the victim–perpetrator model controls citizens. With an afterword by Chris Kraus.

Even the Dead Rise Up, and the political becomes personal. In McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Master Rock is a repertoire for a mountain. 

Rough land, open palm. Bodies are machines that shake. Big boned faces, big hands, big claws, ah Jesus, well-used. Bore. Blast. Smash. Force on loan. Must be hard and clever to survive in this technological age. Granite knows the biological. Gods inside the mountain, just plain men outside.

Working through the cavernous space in Ben Cruachan, the largest peak on the west coast of Scotland, Maria Fusco exhumes three fictional voices from fact: Tunnel tigers, the Irish explosives experts who emptied out the mountain to build a power station; Elizabeth Falconer, the artist who produced a mural inside that only the site’s workers ever see; and Granite, the 450 million year-old rock of Cruachan itself as a main character.

Woman, Native, Other is located at the juncture of a number of different fields and disciplines, and it genuinely succeeds in pushing the boundaries of these disciplines further. It is one of the very few theoretical attempts to grapple with the writings of women of color. - Chandra Talpade Mohanty

In 1987, artist and poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014) and her partner, painter Arakawa (1936–2010), formed the Architectural Body Research Foundation (later to become the Reversible Destiny Foundation)—an architectural office pursuing the radical conviction that architecture would provide humanity with the necessary tools and training to overcome death. Their wide variety of theories investigated how a person might interact with their environment, and how that environment might condition and enhance the body to increase its capabilities—through a constant undoing and unsettling of subject formation. Taking the work and writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa as a broad provocation, The Floor Is Uneven. Does It Slope? aims to swallow and masticate the duo’s thought into a new sort of pulp: a collective fan fiction work. Less a book about Gins and Arakawa than a book after them, it tries to seed their work to various fans—writers and makers indebted to the duo’s thinking or suspected to be enthralled by it. 

Contributors speak about Gins and Arakawa through the language of their own practice, through academia, poetry, essays, photography, experimental writing, and fiction—thinking about what Gins and Arakawa might mean to their individual fields. 

Texts by Henry Andersen, Lila Athanasiadou, Ben Thorp Brown, Lucas Crawford, Bryana Fritz, Laura Herman, Daisuke Kosugi, Joyelle McSweeney, Simone C. Niquille, Andros Zins-Browne.

This substantial archive offers an ideal point of entry into the work and reception of Los Angeles–based performance artist and writer Andrea Fraser (born 1965). The interview format provides particular insight into Fraser's self-positioning as a central aspect of her practice. By presenting the artist's voice as mediated through various interlocutors (ranging from professional peers to popular media), Collected Interviews, 1990–2018 uniquely contextualizes Fraser's practice in the artistic and institutional fields in which she intervenes.

The words collected in the book form a constellation of texts in which the theme of walking becomes a mode of being, a poetic disposition, to redefine one’s relationship with space-time. With words by Kathy E. Ferguson, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Carlo Ginzburg, Fernand Deligny, John Ruskin, Susan Leigh Star & Geoffrey C. Bowke, Usrula K. Le Guin, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Eliott Cardno, Costanza Candeloro, Axelle Stiefel, Giulia Essyad, Gianmaria Andreetta, Arnaud Wohlhauser.

(...) There is no one on the chair, there is no hand on the table, perhaps nobody on the floor. The set up is empty, but some kind of unsettling presence is undeniable. The set up is so obviously fake that there must be something behind it. I am not going to lie: I am going to lie.
If I lie, there is a deliberated stand. I don't have to be "true", to myself, to others. My intention is not to find lying moving, but those who can never lie cannot grow either, cannot discover who they really are. The people, that every day are forced to rip off their personality into fragments, know something about themselves and about life that nobody could teach them. Lying, betraying, is to want to or be able to transform a situation, a fact, an emotion, oneself. The act of lying suddenly un-conceals what has been considered as neutral or as the reference point. The power relations already in place are being revealed, "normality" appears as hegemony. The lie embodies a transgression. It is an attempt to escape normative structures and the refusal to assimilate them. (...)

Includes contributions by Christian Noelle Charles, Andrej Dubravsky, Sandra Golubjevaite, Lewis Hammond, Tarek Lakhrissi, Nils Amadeus Lange, Floriane Michel, Stijn Pommée, Adam Ulbert

sub rosa: The Book of Metaphysics is a three-part interrogation of love, gender, ritual and the body. It heralds a new kind of poetic thinking, one that seeks to articulate and enact a mode of resistance to the obstinacy of present conditions, but which focuses on embodiment, tenderness and optimism. It wants to break present paths and contribute to a collective imagining of a different future; a record of and a practice towards healing.

Les Guérillères imagines the attack on the language and bodies of men by a tribe of warrior women. Among the women’s most powerful weapons in their assault is laughter, but they also threaten literary and linguistic customs of the patriarchal order with bullets. In this breathtakingly rapid novel first published in 1969, Wittig animates a lesbian society that invites all women to join their fight, their circle, and their community.

In the late 1960s, Lee Lozano conceived of and executed a series of 'language pieces,' written in the pages of her notebooks, consisting of rules and parameters for the actions that would constitute a piece. From offering money to house-guests to smoking as much marijuana as possible, Lozano boldly tested social norms, culminating in two of her most famous works: 'General Strike Piece' (1969), which saw her retreating from the art world completely, and 'Decide to Boycott Women' (1971), in which she ceased engaging with all members of her own gender.

Queerdirect is an LGBTQI+ Artist support network, curatorial platform and arts programme. Initiated by Gaby Sahhar in 2017. Co-run With Lily Cheetah. Queerdirect hold regular events and curate exhibitions around London and provide queer artists with a platform and support. Queerdirect is the UK’s first contemporary arts platform and project space dedicated to queer arts.

This is the first edition, September 2019.
A5 perfect bound publication, 81 pp., published by Queerdirect & Camp Books and featuring 31 LGBTQIA+ artists working in and around London.

States of the Body Produced by Love is a modern mystical journey through love – a many-headed snake twisting through devotion, sacrifice and the dream of returning home. 

In her visionary debut, Nisha Ramayya conjures an opalescent world by way of Tantric ritual and myth. Thousand-petalled lotuses bloom inside skulls, goddesses with dirty feet charm honeybees, strains of jazz standards bleed into anti-national anthems. States of the Body Produced By Love weaves essays, poetry and images together to offer fierce meditations on diasporic identity, language and resistance. From grief to bliss, this book explores the many states of the body seized by love in an incantation that never leaves its hold.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin tells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.

Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: ‘before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.’ Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero’s killing tools, our ancestors’ greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. 

This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota, where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.