Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating

Judith Namala: A Novella, Serubiri Moses’s fiction debut, is an experiment in adaptation, storytelling, and translation as fictocriticism. Set in Uganda between the late 1970s and early 2000s, the book follows the domestic dramas of Judith Namala, a Black maid, and Esther Nambi, her Black madam. 

Unfolding across short vignettes, Moses’s innovative prose attends to the silences and opacities that mark the distances—and forced proximities—between two characters whose tense relationship is defined by class and social hierarchy. Hovering at the surface of these quiet scenes of servitude, the narrator offers an enigmatic model of interiority—grasped only in passing, where psychic geographies confront and sometimes, surprisingly, mirror one another. 

Drawing on cultural artifacts, art, film, and his own translation of lyrics from a Luganda popular music songbook, Moses spins a story of housework and labor that reaches across forty years of Ugandan history. Written in a unique style informed by oral tradition, folklore, criticism, and reportage, Judith Namala: A Novella is an intimate, domestic portrait that embraces the poetics of metaphor.

Judith Namala is a cinematic dressing-down of airs and manners: a collision of tradition, ritual, and other social parameters revealed through imperatives or hauntings. In a series of lyric portraits riffing off echoes of Annie John and Sula, poet-writer-curator Serubiri Moses exercises his multitalented explorations of text and artifacts, each image operating almost like a fetish. Here, the elite and extracted, the rural and cosmopolitan, are juxtaposed in suffocations of domesticity.
—Ladan Osman 

Through its innovative structure combining rich storytelling, history, and the writer’s own commentary, Judith Namala tells the story of a household in Uganda in which a young woman from the rural areas is employed as a maid. The story reveals the depth of injustice at the household level, where one woman’s child is abandoned, whilst the children of an elite Kampala household are over-mothered.
—Sitawa Namwalie 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and writer living in New York City. He is the author of two poetry books, THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK and You Who Suffer Because You Love, Love Still More (pântano books, 2023 and 2025). His fiction has appeared in Lolwe and Ursula. Moses is a contributing editor at e-flux journal, and teaches at Hunter College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. This is his first novel.

Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Copy Editor: Re’al Christian
Designer: Stoodio Santiago da Silva, Bárbara Acevedo

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book
and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent.
Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Edited by Chiara Figone

Contributions by Mistura Allison, Berette S Macaulay, Niama Sandy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Deborah Willis

In You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More, Serubiri Moses offers an intimate and personal study of the lives and loves of pop star Freddy Mercury, combining a detailed epigraphy on the duplicitous nature of Mercury's origins, sexuality, and artistic talent with his own delicate memoir as a poet. Through this series of interlocked poems, yet again Moses lures us into an atmosphere both sensual and scholarly that echoes well past its last verse.

With ardor and grace, Serubiri Moses traverses a catalogue of pop music, visual art, and cultural history to bring his readers to a state of openness — to love, to art, and the freewill of ecstatic experience. Moses’s writing forefronts pleasure as a gateway for deeper critical inquiry, braiding personal memory and epigraphic excursions into sex, stardom, and poetry, reminding us in this journey that "pleasure almost happens without us knowing."
— Tausif Noor

Serubiri Moses, Ugandan curator and author, lives in New York City. He serves as a part-time faculty member at Hunter CUNY, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held faculty positions at New York University, and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Chazen Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL), and University of the Arts Helsinki (FL). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. He has curated solo presentations of Carl E. Hazlewood, Reza Aramesh, and is working on a retrospective of Taryn Simon. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal and his short stories have appeared in print in Ursula, and online in Lolwe. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). He is the author of the poetry collection THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK (2023; Pântano Books).

"Para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology for arts institutions.
What can established art institutions learn from small-scale organizations' approaches to invitation, hosting, and publicness? In Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape, Paul O'Neill explores how new forms of invitation can reimagine host–guest relations and open escape routes from fixed institutional roles. Moving between speculation, critique, and proposition, the essay introduces "para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology of generosity and self-organization without absorption. For O'Neill, para-hosting is a form of escape that enables transformative possibilities beyond existing power structures within institutions and otherwise.

In the early 2010s, the idea of "the curatorial" arose after a short but intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The books in the On the Curatorial series look at the consequences of that discussion today and ask: Do we need different curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises? The series allows earlier participants in the debate to reflect on how their concepts and practices have changed, while younger generations of curators explore the ongoing need for new conceptual approaches to curation.
The series is edited by Carolina Rito, who is professor of creative practice research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK, and executive editor of Contemporary Journal.

Paul O'Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, since 2017.

Edited by Carolina Rito.
Contribution by Gerrie van Noord.

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

This book stems from the author’s discontents with Lacanian Psychoanalysis, by drawing from psychoanalysts like Félix Guattari and Sándor Ferenczi, as well as authors like Viveiro DeCastro, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. 

As Lucas Ferraço Nassif elaborates on the possibility of a multiplicitous Unconscious, or rather, a mass of many Unconscious(es), he attempts here to fold the book itself into the text, to make the organisation of the physical book itself a part of the elaboration. 

This 2nd Edition comes with a few editorial changes, and a slightly different design approach. It is being presented now with a suite of endorsements from a group of exciting writers and researchers, including Persis Bekkering, Thomas Lamarre, and Yuchen Li. Much of the first edition is preserved, and an extra text has been added, written by the editor as a part of the lecture at Ifilnova. There has been a focus on making this book more accessible, so we have reworked the design of this edition in Black & White. 

The Unconscious is Semiotic, not Linguistic, and it only jumps out when you read between the lines. Do you remember, back in 1997, when 600 kids had epileptic shocks whilst watching Television—the Pokémon Shock? This might sound strange at first, but Lucas Ferraço Nassif theorises that, contrary to the claim that this was caused by oscillations of blue and red light alone, it could have been caused by microperceptions and intensities within narrative. As Porygon takes Ash and friends into the digital world, the immanence of unconscious assemblages drags viewers in, too. 

Such is the haptic and imagetic nature of this book. Using several design and editorial strategies, and a particular mode of writing, the author attempts to elaborate on their work on the Unconscious by recreating a similar possibility—where book, language and reader collapse into a composition, an assemblage or a haecceity. Unconsciousness operates as the multiplanar compositions of Japanese Anime do, so this book has been organized accordingly—different texts, different temporalities, different voices—and like the Japanese concept of Ma (negative space), or even like CoreCore, something jumps out of the breaks, the gaps in between the layers, and therein lies, for this book, a departure point for elaborating on not just one, but many, Unconscious(es).