Books

Experimental film practice from an international and transdisciplinary perspective.

Karel Doing is an experimental filmmaker and researcher who has worked across the globe with fellow artists and filmmakers, creating a body of work that is difficult to pinpoint with a simple catchphrase. In Ruins and Resilience he weaves autobiographical elements and critical reviews together with his wide ranging interdisciplinary approach, reflecting on his own practice by positioning key works within the context of a vibrant experimental film scene in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Doing demonstrates how experimental filmmakers have continued to renew their practice despite the almost total demise of analog motion picture film and the constant neglect of this art form by institutions and critics. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the book looks into the connections between the work of groundbreaking artists within the field and subjects such as transgression, improvisation, collectivity, materiality, phenomenology, and perception. Specifically, intersections with music and sound are investigated, appealing to the idea of the cross-modal brain, the ability to perceive sounds and images in an integrated way. Instead of looking again at the "golden era" of experimental film, the book starts in the 1980s, showing how this art form has never ceased to surprise and inspire. The author's hands-on engagement with the medium is formational for his more theoretical approach and writing, making the book a highly original contribution in the field that is informative and inspiring for academic and practitioners alike.

Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.

“Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.” - Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
 
“In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.”  If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.” - Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
 
"An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself."  - Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
 
"A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great)." - Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
 
"In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head." - Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug

Is it the computerization of the planet
Or a loosening of my fidelity to suffering
I don’t understand the intensity
I’ve hidden here but I know I despaired
Of finding a physical place to keep
My tears. Now what. Seas that go turquoise
When you stop looking at them . . .
 
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.

Praise for Ariana Reines:

Ariana Reines is a go-for-broke artist who honors her traditions by being like no one else. Some of us have made a fetish of our stupidity, pretending to forget history, and some of us have made a fetish of despair, congratulating ourselves on melancholia, but Ariana is too brilliant and too alive for either of those sad luxuries... I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it's an identity or career. Her voice-which is always more than hers alone is a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge. - Ben Lerner

Reines's books are works of intellectual commitment and structural sophistication; at the same time, they allow the raw stuff of being, in all its messiness, to enter the page. -The White Review

Mind-blowing. - Kim Gordon

Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self. - The New York Times

These are the kinds of poems that reorient you in the world, make you understand how little you know, but how much is inside you. - NYLON

The sixth issue of Viscose Journal focuses on fashion as constructed through words, language and writing. From the pens of fashion journalists and art critics to the conceptual wordplay of designers, the issue delves into the aesthetic and critical effects of “writing fashion” in and outside of fashion industries.

The fashion writer is a confidant, a storyteller, a forecaster, a mythmaker; they are evocative and poetic, forming words that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the latest fashions. From the salon shows to the pages of fashion magazines, their “expressions may be as ephemeral as the fashions they describe,” as Dorothy Hughes noted already in 1935. Early fashion writing played a key role in the transformation of clothes into fashion each season, and in igniting the machine of fashion itself. The historical roots of fashion writing— which was, at least in an industry context, a distinctly female practice— are grounded in the modernization and seasonalization of industrial fashion. And even today, in an age described by many as image-driven, this remains true: across various media platforms, language not only surrounds fashion but also continuously contributes to its creation.

The succinct, ephemeral poetry of the fashion writer still plays—nearly a century since Hughes’ observation—a transformative role in the seasonal turnover of fashion, but its role in the fashion industry remains seriously overlooked. Fashion invests substantially in seasonally refreshing the visual messaging accompanying its physical commodities, but language plays a similarly important support in this artful game of marketing. In this industrial context spanning from press releases to magazine production, writing is devoted to fashion promotion, prioritizing its fundamental traits of novelty, urgency, and semiotic complexity. In this context, fashion writing is a process of mystification, capable of revealing things that the image cannot. The material conditions of fashion writing—of being for fashion—generates a unique set of poetics and syntax. Fashion writing, or “written fashion,” as Roland Barthes asserts, is a form of signification that is simultaneously real and imaginary, connected to the real garment that it signifies, but largely unencumbered by its materiality. Given the constraints of economic, cultural, and political factors on fashion writing, it is perhaps more interesting to ask, what is fashion writing really encumbered by, and what would it mean to “unencumber” it?

Since Baudelaire, art critics have turned to fashion as source material for their practice, casting fashion in the role of art’s capitalist conspirator, temporal truth-sayer, or feminine alter-ego. This erratic history is one filled with both fraught politics (rooted in a gendered division of labor) as well as critical possibility: art writing gestures to a style of intellectualism and independence from industry that is largely foreign in fashion. Viscose Journal has, since its founding, aimed to detach fashion criticism from industrial frameworks that has historically premised it. At the same time, informed by a materialist politics of fashion labor, we wish to seriously level the largely female writing of commercial fashion publications with the masculine philosophical inquiries of fashion.

While “fashion writing” denotes a thematic category within the wider field of writing, our theme of “writing fashion” prompts an exploration of fashion writing as a mode of fashion production and critique. This issue aims to explore writing as a tool for shaping fashion and broaden its perspectives by presenting a survey of experimental, fictocritical, and poetic approaches to writing fashion. In this expanded field of writing, “fashion” unfolds as a ubiquitous and epistemologically complex phenomena of everyday life pertinent to all.

Accompanied by the exhibition “Writing Fashion“ at and published by the International Library for Fashion Research in Oslo, Norway, staged in June 2024, Viscose Journal 06 strives to be a thought-provoking journey into the captivating intersection of fashion and language. We are grateful to the library’s fantastic team and collaborators for their ongoing support and collaboration.

with works by: Osman Ahmed, Alba Aragón, Katherine Bernard, Ricarda Bigolin, Eileen Chang, Dal Chodha, Eduardo Costa, Jose Unzueta Criale, Femke De Vries, Becket Flannery, Kennedy Fraser, Laura Gardner, Patrick Greaney, Bruce Hainley, Elizabeth Hawes, Nakako Hayashi, Devin Hentz, Elaine Wing-Ah Ho, Juje Hsiung, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Jamaica Kinkaid, Chantal Kirby, Jeremy Lewis, Davora Lindner, Hanne Lippard, Shanzhai Lyric, Shizuang Magazine, Celine Mathieu, Derek Mccormack, H.B. Peace, Julie Peeters, John Perrault, Vogue Runway Rag, Rachel Tashjian, Jeppe Ugelvig, Elizabeth VR, Hanna Weiner, Elizabeth Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto, Bruno Zhu.

An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning “the selves of herself” via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents’ garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record—and retain—our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that both literally and metaphorically shape them?

It’s 2009 and summer is encroaching on the town of Bellingen when Rhiannon is forced to move from her local high school to one in Coffs Harbour. Initially reluctant to leave behind her best friend Ellie, she quickly finds herself infatuated with the enigmatic Vanora. It’s only on befriending her, does she discover that like her, Vanora is a girl whose home life is shrouded in a web of secrets. Secrets that relate to her mother.

Set in the verdant Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia, Thora deals with family dysfunction, emancipation through friendship, and how girlhood is affected by the isolation of the country and the solace of nature.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based sex worker and writer. Her debut title Nothing But My Body was published in 2021.

Cover art by Rufus Shakespeare

The North Road Songbook collects together eight sequences of poems, most of which were composed between 2019 and 2024. The title sequence is a set of lyrics written around North Road in Brighton, originally a mediaeval field boundary, now a chaotic thoroughfare filled with ghosts, sirens and songs.

Verity Spott is a poet, teacher and care worker from Brighton, England, whose books include Hopelessness (the 87press), Poems of Sappho (in translation) and Prayers Manifestos Bravery (Pilot Press). Verity’s poetry has appeared in The New York Times and has been translated into French, German and Greek.

This book, Deux Ans de Vacances, Dos Años de Vacaciones, Dwa Lata Wakacji, Two years Vacation, Due Anni di Vacanza, documents the production of Céline Condorelli's process-based, cumulative artwork titled 'Tools for Imagination'. The title of the book raises the question of labour and working time, starting from a non-equivalence with its inverse: free time. We can read the various iterations of the title which appear on the cover as an expression of the impossibility of thinking about time outside of work in a univocal dimension.

BILL 5 contains 192 offset printed pages printed in CMYK, silver,
black and white on a dozen different paper stocks with
some Japanese bound signatures.

Sand, wind, tide, bills, tulips, LA, parking lots, waves, thoughts, bagels, prints, Tokyo, orchids, horses, backs, balm, magazines, updates, shadows, Elena's shoe, two mudbaths and a garage door...

by Boyle Family, Jochen Lempert, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Gillian Garcia, Beat Streuli, Takashi Homma, JP, Adrianna Glaviano, Mimosa Echard, Rosalind Nashashibi, Gerald Domenig, Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, Martiniano, Blommers Schumm

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. — Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. — Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024

A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.

Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular “This Month in History” column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events, four per month, each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future. From the first AI president to the first dog on Mars to the funeral of Earth’s last glacier, these stories are speculative SF at its most (and least) serious.

Collected as a series for the first time, Tomorrowing will amuse, alarm, intrigue, entertain, and like all good science fiction, make readers think. Bisson’s short stories have won every major award in science fiction, including the Hugo and the Nebula, but never, ever anything for this series.

Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project, Corrections and Clarifications, is a newspaper without headlines, a cyclical reverse-chronology of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news, printed in numerous languages, locations, and formats since September 2001. An intermittent catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, obstinate patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The twentieth anniversary hardbound edition of the publication, entitled The Error is Regretted, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin.

This 2024 iteration, in a xeroxed edition of 100, collects corrections to news items back to 1981 — with its focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region, on patterns of mis-telling and misrepresentation through the persistent misuse of the passive voice, the omission of widely observable and verifiable facts and events, the euphemizing and toning down of deliberate actions, erasures through shifts in terminologies, through bold mistakes and tentative corrections.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, a taste for the possession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles. Anita uses widely varying sources: from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

The third volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination.

In 2022, the collective Wages for Wages Against applied for the Swiss Art Awards with the ambition of questioning the very model of the prize and its impact on artists. Art competitions are presented as real opportunities for artists, and arise throughout their careers, starting with school—entrance selection procedure, juried evaluations, diplomas and honors distinctions—, all the way to professional recognition—Meret Oppenheim Prize, Marcel Duchamp Prize, Turner Prize, etc. Only a handful of artists are selected for merit-based reward. However, this logic of sorting and validation upholds an entire system that reproduces inequalities and that perpetuates precarity in a milieu that is exclusive, and thus excludes. The institutional practices of communication and selection, as well as the validation of unpaid labor, favor certain artists at the expense of others. In this context, we surveyed the artists who participated, are considering participating, or are not participating in the Swiss Art Awards competition, in the interest of understanding their experiences and sharing their demands. In a broader sense, we wish to rethink the founding principles of artists' support policies and work to build a less competitive art world.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Contributions by Nathalie Stirnimann & Stefan Stojanovic and Amandine Gay.

Published on the occasion of Mudun Short Story Prize, an international competition that pays tribute to cities around the Arab world which was launched by the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah (UAE), in 2021, Mudun: Stories from Arab Cities brings together the 19 stories—10 in Arabic and nine in English—that were shortlisted for the prize, including the winning submissions.

Texts by Neetha Kurup, Soraya Morayef, Ashton Eleazer, Noora Alhashimi, Lynn Cheikh Moussa, Ramzi Maqdisi, Fatemah Raed Al Awadh, Barrak Alzaid, Bhoomika Ghaghada, Sami Raghad, Naima Abdul Wahab Abdullah, Diar Murshid, Wajdi Al Ahdal, Ben Addi, Nawaf Al Mazmi, Maryam Mirza, Laila Kubba, Ahmed Fouadeldin.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy—and its correlate, love—is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, and Art in America, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.

What gets counted within the category of heritage, and who gets to do the counting?

This book contributes to discussions about what counts as heritage now, who gets to do the counting, and broader related issues around the subject of cultural sovereignty. It unpacks historical narratives and political memories linked with objects, sites, and ceremonies that have been lost, looted, restituted, repatriated, revived, or reinvented. Through its diverse line-up of discourse, poetry, and original artistic contributions, it weaves together subjects and geographies that are not usually part of the same conversation —from plundered cultural belongings held in colonial collections, to processes of renaming or removing symbols of past eras— and considers how they relate in the context of recent social upheavals and political processes across continents.

In our era of dangerous revisionism, when history has become a battlefield for both the left and the right, we are asking: How can art reconfigure our collective foundational myths? And of what should we let go on the journey towards figuring it out?

A series of “Bad Paintings” by the Geneva-based artist.

White noise escapes from the 3rd floor of an opulent building located in the Eaux-Vives district. In an apartment, converted into a laboratory, hum a whole bunch of complicated machines linked together by a tangle of multicolored electrical wires. In the middle of all this mess, wrapped in transparent plastic sheets, a new experience will take place in a few moments.

Indeed, for the first time in history, a team of researchers will be able to precisely decode the creative process of an artist. Plunged into an artificial coma, the Genevan painter Josse Bailly wears a sort of motorcycle helmet, from which colorful cables spring. At the end of the test, Bailly's abundant pictorial practice will no longer have any secrets for the scientists present. The mechanism of his artistic frenzy, this true fury to paint, will be translated in an intelligible and logical manner.

Suddenly, a crackling sound is heard. Eyes rolling back, Bailly suddenly sits up square on the massage table transformed into an electric chair. Foaming at the mouth, he chants a series of names of old rock groups from the 70s. Sparks come out of the artist's blackened nostrils. His head looks like it's going to explode any minute. The screens light up in the smoke. Words scroll continuously on the monitors: "The beanbag chair", "Harvard beets", "I love wiener dog".

The pellets go off, putting an end to the strange scene which is more reminiscent of a planned execution than a scientific study. An expression of perplexity freezes on the stunned faces of the team of researchers. In a heavy silence where there is a smell of scorching, a young assistant risks slipping in a confused voice: "I think he likes to illustrate wiener dogs because he finds them cute and it's cool to draw them."

The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art, written in 1971, reevaluates the legacies of painting inherited by the artist Nilima Sheikh.

Drifting between two inadequate models, one an import of British Colonialism, and another desperate for an identification as "Indian", the artist engages with the works of Raja Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy, as well as the critical and art historical writing surrounding these practices, to offer a revaluation of these legacies and a possible way forward—one that she would go on to articulate in her own decades-long engagement with painting.

Published here for the first time, The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art was written as part of Nilima Sheikh's Master's in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

Itinéraires Fantômes is an oracle deck created by Alexandra Grant with Hélène Cixous in celebration of H. Cixous' work.

The Itinéraires Fantômes deck consists of 72 cards in six categories: animots, creatures, and entities that include Those from Below, Those from Above, Those Who Fly/Steal, who travel via Portals, manipulate Messages and Symbols, and have Superpowers. The cards are accompanied by a booklet in English and French.

The images on these cards come from family, friends, and artists who have been inspired by Hélène Cixous' writing. Artists include: Adel Abdessemed, Pierre Alechinsky, Sara Barker, Gabrielle Berger, Louise Bourgeois, Leonardo Bravo, Maria Bussmann, Sarah Cain, Lewis Carroll, Bertrand Charneau, Maria Chevska, Michael Kennedy Costa, Laura Darbutaitė, Tacita Dean, Edgar Fabián Frías, Jeffrey Gibson, Francisco Goya, Alexandra Grant, Mathew Hale, Simon Hantaï, Johanna Hedva, Roni Horn, Victor Hugo, Hanna Hur, Franz Kafka, YeRin Kim, Lynn Marie Kirby, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, Colin Lemoine, Laure Prouvost, Elsa Prudent, Addy Rabinovitch, Keanu Reeves, Cindy Rehm, Saranya Siegel-Berger, Shinique Smith, Nancy Spero, Luc Tuymans, Unyimeabasi Udoh, Roger Viollet, Anna Winger.

A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.

“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.

Transcribed from previously unpublished text-sound transcripts, the edition also brings together selections from Greenham’s aphorisms and 50 words-stories and a fragmentary pre / post-script from documents in the Lily Greenham Archive, and is accompanied by an epistolary insert from sound poet Larry Wendt.

Greenham was an artist / composer / writer / performer and inventor of the term ‘lingual music’. This launch is part of a two-day symposium that coincides with the exhibition ‘Lily Greenham: An Art of Living’ at the Badischer Kunstverein, the first large-scale retrospective of her work.

Written in response to three “physical” photographs, ‘Broken Villas’ contains and considers how a vessel might clasp tightly to known volumetric identities, but also loom with a set of accentuated clues towards otherness: the excavated seams in the earth and what we fill those holes with, imaginary or otherwise; the glacial erraticism of the boulder; the queer crimping of a hotel pillowcase; the modes via which objects are housed as display, but also packaged away, with sorrow, with fear, with erotism etc.

The text by Hiller navigates the boundaries between art, anthropology and psychoanalysis in relation to her installation at the Freud Museum in 1994 titled At the Freud Museum. Accompanying images included throughout from Book Works UK archive, the commissioner of the artwork and talks that this text is edited from.