Books

A book on reading, writing, memory and forgetting in a library of living books.

This publication documents a project inspired by Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which performers memorize a book to form a collection of living books to be read in libraries by visitors. The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians, and a visual essay.

The project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine starts as a group of people who dedicate themselves to memorizing a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. The “books” pass their time in libraries reading, memorizing, talking to each other, going for walks outside, prepared to be read by a visitor. The readings take place as intimate one-to-one encounters where the “book” recites its content to the reader. Over time the project grew into a library collection of more than eighty living books in twelve different languages across Europe and beyond. The project developed into a bookshop, a publishing house and an exhibition format, and hosted workshops, lectures and talks and, eventually, a book.

The publication brings together eighteen text contributions from artists and theoreticians with a varying degree of proximity to the project. Their reflections touch on memory and forgetting; on the practice of learning by heart and its corporeality; on reading, re-reading, reading aloud, reading for oneself and for others; on writing, re-writing and translating; on invisible and impossible literatures; on alternative temporalities and their respective economies; on archives, libraries, bodies and other sites for conservation; on the problems of authorship and originality; on immateriality and its discontents; on the equivocal borders between reality and fiction; and on the strange and unforeseeable dynamics of people and stories coming together, disseminating and unexpectedly crossing paths again. The second part of the book is a visual essay that documents the processes of memorizing, reading and re-writing.

Contributions by: Mette Edvardsen, Kristien Van Den Brande, Johan Sonnenschein, Bruno De Wachter, Lizzie Thompson, Sébastien Hendrickx, Victoria Pérez Royo, Jon Refsdal Moe, Bojana Cvejić, Melanie Fieldseth, Jeroen Peeters, Lara Khalidi, Emiliano Battista, Thomaz Bîrzan, Susanne Christensen, Olivia Fairweather and Laurence Rassel.

This book marks the ten-year anniversary of the project A Collective Memory by Azin Feizabadi. The project encompasses five narrative-driven films, alongside other artworks. Each film has its own urgency, approach, and point of departure. The films naturally vary in their subjects, they touch upon stories of migration, uprising, transformation, revolution, renewal, collapse, defeat, depression, and desire that connect the life of the artist with those around him. The research materials that have come up over the course of this project consist, on the one hand, of concrete historical events and, on the other hand, all the innumerable, fragmented personal memories spread between pats, presents, and futures that narrate every-changing stories of how things were, are, and may be.

Contributors: Jens Maier-Rothe & Ashkan Sepahvand (co-editors) Shahab Fotouhi, Nanna Heidenreich, Sarah Rifky, Rasha Salti, Ashkan Sepahvand, Jan Verwoert, Chiara Figone

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

Selected from a sequence of 100 poems written on a long day in the summer of 2013, Anne Boyer's Money City Sick as Fuck imagines writing a poem "in a confederacy of exception [...] called 'wages for tenderness and nothing else'". Situated between Pompeii and Olympus, at "Texaco in ruins" or the amusement park, in a bar called Lethe, at the saddest prom in history, taking "every odd route", these poems passionately survey and survive the streets and jails of the modern-day polis,"sunbathing in Atlantis", oracles IRL.

241. Laura Buccieri: Songbook for a Boy Inside
240. K. Lorraine Graham: from Feed
239. Marta López-Luaces: Reminiscences of Echoes
238. Montana Ray: Mirroring
237. Yumi Dineen Shiroma: A Novel Depicting “The” “Asian” “American” “Experience”
236. Anaïs Duplan: 9 Poems/The Lovers
235. Serena J. Fox: Night Landing
234. Orchid Tierney: Blue Doors
233. Aditi Machado: This Touch
232. Iman Mersal: الصوت في غير مكانه (The Displaced Voice); translated by Lisa White
231. Abdellah Taïa: 99 Names
230. Javier Zamora: Revising into the Right? Form…Hopefully?
229. Aracelis Girmay: MOTHER MOTHER YOU ARE WHO I LOVE
228. Christina Barreiro, Lindsey Hoover, Fatima Lundy, Rupert McCranor, Kayla Park, Chrissy Ramkarran, Asiya Wadud, Rachael Guynn Wilson: Out-Of-Office
227. Baseera Khan: Be Careful What You Wish
226. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi: Alphabet of an Unknown City
225. Göksu Kunak: I thought this would

Please specify which edition you would like. You can reach out to confirm availability of specific chaplets.

247. Sahar Muradi: A Garden Beyond My Hand
246. Diana Khoi Nguyen: Unless
245. Pamela Sneed: from Black Panther
244. Gail Scott: from Furniture Music
243. Ru (Nina) Puro: I Give You a Feeling, Sweet Jasmine, an Absence
242. Raquel Gutiérrez: There’s a Mother in my Lazy Pompadour

Please specify which edition you would like. You can reach out to confirm availability of specific chaplets.