Authenticity Is a Feeling

05/09/04 Now she is blogging. Now she is sitting on the black couch listening to the sirens wail and the rain fall. Now she is thinking of oysters. Now she is wondering why this is worth sharing. Now she is thinking, how decipher what is worth reading? Who is to say? Sifters. She thinks we have become a nation of sifters. So began a three-year experiment in blogging. An experiment begun for many reasons—a way for an expat to keep in touch with fellow Canadian writers and artists, a way to come to terms with the increasing relevance of the internet in literary lives, and a way to figure out why, after decades of gains, women writers are still grossly underrepresented in critical dialogues.

With an afterword by Vanessa Place.

Accompanying a series of solo collaborations in 2020, this publication offers the first comprehensive and global perspective on Jeremiah Day's work as an artist, performer, researcher and teacher. As it details Day's specific works and evolution between visual and performing arts and between political reflection and engagement the result also serves as sourcebook for the legacy of the intersection between dance and the visual arts of the 1960s and 70's and the models of cultural practice emerging from the work of Hannah Arendt.

In his work, the Berlin-based American artist Jeremiah Day (born 1974 in Plymouth) re-examines recent political struggles and conflicts, revealing their subjective contexts and traces. To do this, he has developed a narrative and choreographic form in which personal and political realities intermingle, thus offering a thoroughly singular vision of these at times forgotten moments of history. 

The distinctive feature of his method lies in a transversal approach. As a student of and regular collaborator with Simone Forti, one of the pioneers of Post-Modern Dance, he has turned performance into a now central and structure-providing practice. Since 2014, Jeremiah Day has in effect presented many performances, which contain movement, improvisation, photography and the spoken word, in order to broach universal historical and political subjects, but within an intimate and incarnated context.

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Thirty texts by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston.

Jill Johnston was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston's original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston.”

Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder.
Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Bruce Hainley, Jennifer Krasinski, Ingrid Nyeboe.

Eleven performance-based projects by Dora García, documented through letters, emails and other elements from the artist's private correspondence with various interpreters of performances, whether they were direct collaborators of simple spectators.

Edited and prefaced by François Piron, Steal This Book, a tribute to Abbie Hoffmann's pamphlet of the same name, is not a definitive attempt at rendering the pieces on which it is based; it calls for a free, active and contradictory reception, that of an open archive. Part epistolary novel, part rough screenplay and part user's manual, Steal This Book proposes a body of discussions, questions without answers and endless ramblings, in place of the critique's or the artist's voice. 

The book has also been presented in exhibitions as a Dora García sculpture meant to be stolen, but it can also be purchased in selected bookstores worldwide.

Contrary to the idea that would have art addressing the greatest possible number of people, Dora García (born in 1965 in Valladolid, lives and works in Barcelona), best known for her performance devices, is interested in what is enacted at the individual scale: in a radically conceptual form, at once accessible and elegant, she elects to transmit oddly coded messages, their ask being to bestir a specific relation with each and every visitor. Dora García is interested in everything that intervenes in the communication between an artist and his/her public: art no longer represents the world, but itself becomes a producer of realities often on the borderline of fiction and make-believe. It urges us to undergo experiences other than ordinary situations, at once simple and hard to grasp. 

Dora García has had solo exhibitions at the MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the SMAK in Gent. She represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and was a part of the Skulptur Projekte Münster 07, the Sydney Biennial in 2009, the Biennale de Lyon in 2009 and Documenta 13 in 2012.

JJ brings together articles by cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon Jill Johnston, translated into French for the first time, as well as texts, poems and drawings by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol.

Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a dance critic, performer, writer, and feminist and lesbian activist. Her books include Marmalade Me (1971), Lesbian Nation (1973), Gullibles Travels (1974) and numerous articles in The Village Voice.

Texts by Jill Johnston; contributions by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Translated from the English (American) by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Nina Kennel, Rosanna Puyol.

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).