Books

A quarterly print journal publishing new writing and artworks with a focus on practices that work between disciplines and against type. There is always a third thing between two things that are known; we are interested in whatever there is between translations/transitions, things-in-progress, converging genres, methods of excavation and formal innovation. The purpose of the journal is to provide a test site for ideas and research; a space for experimental modes and new prototypes.

The second issue of Fieldnotes contains new work by:

Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Steve Dutton
Liesl Ujvary
Akio Yuguchi
Evan Lavender-Smith
Dodie Bellamy
Paul Maheke & Giles Bailey
Yan Jun
Emily Charlton
Ed Atkins
Sam Buchan-Watts
Elizabeth Price
Mary Mussman
Carolyn Ferrucci
Hanne Lippard
Charlie Godet Thomas
Hannah Regel

TEKELI-LI in "Mountains of Madness" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft is a scream that frightens polar explorers upon their arrival in a hidden city at the South Pole. An online bibliography listing Antarctic fictions is called the same.

Taking the shape of an encyclopedia and an adventure book, "Tekeli-li" is the first catalogue of artist Judith Neunhäuserer, mapping the various elements constituting her œuvre and research. This book includes a special ephemera: a handmade recycled A4 made from the publications used during her research. 

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!).

"Having a party (hope you will be there)", is a catalogue of an exhibition organized by Mickael Marman and D&TLG at CFAlive in Milan with artists from the black European diaspora, including original contributions, photos of the show, as well as a brand new intro text by Olamiju Fajemisin.

'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.

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.

At turns humorous and absurd, heartfelt and searching, Photo No-Nos is for photographers of all levels wishing to avoid easy metaphors and to sharpen their visual communication skills. 

Photographers often have unwritten lists of subjects they tell themselves not to shoot—things that are cliché, exploitative, derivative, sometimes even arbitrary. Photo No-Nos features ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world's most talented photographers and photography professionals, along with an encyclopedic list of more than a thousand taboo subjects compiled from and with pictures by contributors.  

Not a strict guide, but a series of meditations on "bad" pictures, Photo No-Nos covers a wide range of topics, from sunsets and roses to issues of colonialism, stereotypes, and social responsibility. At a time when societies are reckoning with what and how to communicate through media and who has the right to do so, this book is a timely and thoughtful resource on what photographers consider to be off-limits, and how they have contended with their own self-imposed rules without being paralyzed by them.

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.

A collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.

So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back?  Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.—Dodie Bellamy, “Hoarding as Ecriture”

This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.

Romance Utopia is a research project is both a digital archive, a radioshow, a videowork and a collection of essays around notions of romance.

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 ultimate ambition of this book-tool is to “disappear on the street”. Its pages collect words and stories of people whose right to exist and be visible in public spaces was forced to confront the concepts of “legality” and “justice”.

Considering the assumption that the law is a fluid parameter, which changes depending on where we are in the world, the historical period in which we live and the sort of privileges we enjoy, the law defines what is considered moral, licit, in other words, what is right. It distributes power and the perception of power in society, defining, categorizing, dividing and controlling.

WILL YOU MARRY ME? is a public lecture and an artist’s book by Sara Leghissa and Marzia Dalfini, investigating a specific portion of the spectrum of illegality, namely the relationship between illegal acts and public space. It explores how we can act disobedience before everyone’s eyes, suggesting possible forms of complicity and public resistance.

All the content was collected by the artist during meetings and conversations that took place in Prato, Milan, Ramallah, Marseille, Madrid, Nyon and Lausanne and with this book-tool their words become manifestos that the reader is invited to detach and relocate into the public space.

Designed by Marzia Dalfini. Published by NERO with the support of L’Altra.

Format: 42 x 29,7 cm
Pages: 28
Language: IT / EN
Year: 2021

This third issue reviews the many ways in which medicine has pathologized non-procreative sexual desire— those bodies that challenge gender binaries or expose different abilities—while imagining other ways of collectively well-being.

"The issue opens with a commissioned work by visual artists CANDICE LIN and P. STAFF that evokes the central concerns of the journal in subtle and unexpected ways. Lambda Literary Award–winner INDRAPRAMIT DAS speculates on other forms of kinship in a new science-fiction story, while a transnational questionnaire offers insights into the continuous fight for reproductive justice.

We republish a chapter from the autobiography of the late South African, trans, traditional healer NKUNZI ZANDILE NKABINDE, which is introduced by RUTH MORGAN.

We continue to honor the power of poetry with works by ROSA CHÁVEZ and STELLA NYANZI, while celebrating the energy of collective action with a piece by WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? In anticipation to his new book on queer desire in the Caribbean, scholar ANDIL GOSINE shares a previous article addressing the notion of “against nature,” while our Columns section brings news from Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and the UK during a season of pandemic fatigue, but also care work, organization, and hope." — the editors

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.

The first issue of the editorial discursive space for the Bergen Assembly triennial, conceived by Saâdane Afif, explores the identity, role and position of the Professor.

Side Magazine is conceived as a site of research for the fourth edition of Bergen Assembly convened by Saâdane Afif. Yasmine d'O., who has been invited as curator of the upcoming edition, will be the executive editor. 
Side Magazine is dedicated to the seven characters in The Heptahedron, a play written by the French poet, essayist, and scholar Thomas Clerc in 2016. In order of apparition these characters are the Professor, the Moped Rider, the Bonimenteur, the Fortune Teller, an Acrobats, the Coalman, and the Tourist.

The first issue of Side Magazine is dedicated to the figure of the Professor. It features seven articles, each of which explores the identity, role, and position of the Professor. Contributors include Uli Aigner, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jörg Heiser, Christian Nyampeta, Marjorie Senechal, and Vivian Slee. 
Seven issues of Side Magazine will be released in the run up to the opening of Bergen Assembly 2022, opening September 8. A special eighth issue will be published after the opening days. This, combined with the existing seven issues as a collection, constitute the exhibition catalogue and guide.

Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects. These creations, of uncertain status, oscillate between function and symbol, between art and design, and provoke shifts of meaning that engage a reflection on today's industrial society.

A documentary and speculative publication on a genealogy of political, social, ecological and identity-based struggles in the Brittany region and the West of France, from the 1960s to the Zone to Defend of today, based on numerous documents and films made by filmmakers and collectives.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, in 2019.

Texts by Isabelle Cambourakis, Jade Lindgaard, Élise Roullaud; interviews with Jean-Louis Le Tacon, Patrick Prado, Joseph Potiron, Olivier Tric. 
Graphic design: Laure Giletti & Grégory Dapra.
 
published in September 2021

Second volume of Ion Grigorescu's translated diaries, assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

In recent years, the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of the seminal Eastern European visual artists of his generation, has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014 by Sternberg Press—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979. It not only counters the facile reading of Grigorescu's practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance art, but provides insight into the artist's multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, an analysis of subjectivity, and a penetrating gaze into a dialectic of secrecy and elucidation, of exposure and mystification.

Grigorescu's diaries are written notes revolving around the status of the image and investigate the relation of the body to society and of art to the world through a phenomenological approach. His work proposes a parallel conception of the public made tangible through the eloquence of the body.

In poetic language full of powerfully pictorial metaphors, Grigorescu's reflects on the tension between the realistic effects of the image, the suppression of realism, and the hidden traces the gaze holds through the activities of the increasingly present unconscious of collective memory. Along with the drawings, paintings, photographs, and sketches that accompany them, the diaries serve as an introduction that open the possibility of conceiving Grigorescu's art as a rare evocation of a singular way of thinking: a stance.

Ion Grigorescu (born 1945, lives and works in Bucarest) is one of the most emblematic artistic personalities of the post-war period in Romania, a key figure of conceptual artin Eastern Europe.

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.

First French translation of José Esteban Muñoz's field defining work—an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars.

Cruiser l'utopie describes a movement, a drifting advance between theory, philosophy, art criticism and personal narrative. The works cited, narrated, are mixed with family or individual narrative and more academic considerations. This practice of queer theory and aesthetics is part of a new interpretation of hope as perceived by philosopher Ernst Bloch, articulated with black radical thought and the poetic research of authors such as Fred Moten and Eileen Myles. 

Muñoz focuses here on the period of the Stonewall revolts (New York, 1969) and analyzes, for example, the works of Frank O'Hara, King Jone/Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Kevin Avance, Samuel R. Delany, Fred Herko, Jill Johnston, Ray Johnson. Queer theory as a study has a new way of researching and writing, a form of hybridity between philosophy and cultural studies. The critique is, as if by anticipation, contained in the counter-normative artistic practice and daily life whose narratives, both subjective and historical, hint at a queer future, a place of transformation and liberation. 

The text, translated from English by Alice Wambergue, is accompanied by a preface by Elisabeth Lebovici and a poem by Fred Moten.

José Esteban Muñoz (1967 - 2013) is a queer scholar and art theorist. Author of The Sense of Brown (published posthumously in 2020), Cruising Utopia, the Aftermath and Elsewhere of Queer Advent (2009), and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), he edited the collective works Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997). Muñoz has long taught in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and edited the Sexual Cultures series at New University Press, where he has published works such as Jack Halberstam and Samuel Delany.

In this third Why I Write volume, Eileen Myles addresses the social, political, and aesthetic conditions that shape their work.

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.  

For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place, as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Paperback edition - 2021.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn. Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

40 p, ills colour & bw, 13 x 21 cm, pb, English

BILL 3 a special archival issue, features unpublished Martin Margiela lookbook photographs, a horse, street style from the 90’s, vases of Japan, a silver story, a flash forward and back, tennis, an icecube tray, more Margiela, Hysteric Glamour and a bunch of frivilous images.

The stories are sourced from the book collections of RareBooksParis and Julie Peeters.

Printed in 2020, bound in 2021.