REMMUS

“Invest in a floating city or gentrify a submerged one.”

Nourhan Maayouf’s I Was Going to Work is a hybrid sci-fi picture book by the Cairo-based artist, in which the proto-cyborg citizens of Happy Land Nation establish new-fashioned diurnal rhythms against the ever-present backdrop of a monorail to nowhere and its pillars, idle and idolatrous.

Across forty-four spreads of what might be thought of as a picture book for adults, Maayouf delves into every aspect of a deeply familiar society in which retrograde devolution is billboarded as reinvention by Orwellian technocrats and speculators.

And yet pockets of the cyborg population continue striving, dreaming, craving, protesting, gleaning, and inventing. For a situation to be bleak, some notion of beauty must remain tenaciously rooted where it matters most.

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.

I am not deep, although my eyes are, like a black sea that has been forgotten, as many have told me.

Noura Alsouma’s zine “Nawar’s Sketchbook” is a liquid lament by the Berlin-based Syrian visual artist and printmaker, riveted to eyes that see and therefore shed tears, channeling the heartfelt exposure of the sketchbooks Noura fills to the bleed.

With a moving text by the artist in the original Arabic, reproduced in her handwriting, as well as in English translation by Suja Sawafta.

Over the past two decades, artist Germaine Kruip has steadily developed a practice, which merges time, space and perception. Like an anthropological stage director, she investigates, simplifies and presents her observations in a subtle manner often through architectural interventions. In each of these interventions, she changes a location into a stage, with the audience as actors in a play of substantive absence. By doing so, she activates both physical and mental awareness.

This publication presents an overview of the Kruip’s practice since 1999, two years prior to her engagement with the art context. Presenting over 40 works, the publication reflects on three periods in the artist’s practice, each accompanied by an essay contributed by Anna Gritz, Eva Wittocx and Stephanie Bailey. The idea of a catalogue raisonné came out of a conversation that followed Kruip’s ambitious project Geometry of the Scattering, which was presented at de Oude Kerk in Amsterdam in 2015 – 2016.

This publication acts as a postscriptum to the exhibition project Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders by Simon Asencio for SB34—The Pool in Brussels. Dedicated to Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi and sexutopia novel, the exhibition was conceived as a process of annotating the book, expanding on the ethics discussed by the characters of the novel through installation, performative readings and with the complicity of other artists and their works. This devious object pursues such an intertextual process, extending and disseminating the writings forged by the exhibition. 

Cette publication se présente comme le post-scriptum de l'exposition de Simon Asencio Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders pour SB34—The Pool à Bruxelles. Dédiée au roman de science-fiction et de sexutopie de Samuel R. Delany dont elle porte le titre, l'exposition a été pensée comme un processus d'annotation de ce livre, développant les formes éthiques mises en pratique par les personnages du récit, à travers des installations, des lectures et situations performatives, avec la complicité d'autres artistes. Cet objet interlope poursuit ce processus intertextuel, en prolongeant et disséminant les écritures forgées par l'exposition.

With contributions by / avec les contributions de: Reinhold Aman, Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Jen Brodie, Chloe Chignell, Jack Cox, Samuel R. Delany, Diana Duta, Loucka Fiagan, gladys, Stefa Govaart, Sean Gurd, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Bernard-Marie Koltès, David J. Melnick, Matthieu Michaut, Margaret Miller, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Anouchka Oler Nussbaum, Grisélidis Réal, Páola Revenióti, Sabrina Seifried, Raphaëlle Serres, Valerie Solanas, sabrina soyer, Megan Susman.

Tips of the Sung is a collection of interdisciplinary texts from Samuel Brzeski composed over the five years whilst he was Associate Artist at Lydgalleriet. The collection brings together performance scripts for voice and video with newly composed texts for the page. Centring on the vibrations of the voice, the texts exist somewhere between signification and delirium, at times making more sound than sense. 

The texts are full of bumbling mumbles, meandering hums, homophones, inner voices, affirmations, motivations, subvocalisations, resolutions, errors in speech production, peach seduction, car maintenance manuals, self-help fallacies, roomy echo chambers, overheard language lessons, morning meditations, and other forms of verbal rehearsal at the limits of language.

In 2015, Jacob finds himself wandering the streets, swamps and cemeteries of New Orleans. Through his search for a man named Ignatius, 'O Fortuna' tells the story of his attempt to make a film. We discover the city’s unique atmosphere and meet a bizarre cast of characters who assist Jacob with his uncertain attempts at shooting scenes of DAT LIKWID LAND.

An immersion in the flow of language, words, and images within David Douard's work.

A jumble of workshop views, recent productions, and reassembled fanzines, inner GLOw' replica delves into the roots of David Douard's practice. The "zines," which he has been compulsively producing for years, interact with his works, contaminating them. Pages of collages, drawings, photocopies, scraps of tape, torn magazines, slogans picked up on social media, and photos taken with smartphones reveal the density and formation process of the artist's language. This flow insinuates itself and transmutes within his sculptures and installations, whose teeming and polymorphous materiality is revealed in an exhaustive set of objective photographs.

Three texts are added to this iconographic corpus: a phantasmagorical fiction by Charlie Fox, an essay by Ingrid Luquet-Gad, and a poetic enumeration by Nina Kennel.

inner GLOw' replica—the first book published by Zzz—is the result of a long collaboration between David Douard and designers Thomas Bizzarri and Alain Rodriguez.

Born 1983 in Perpignan, David Douard lives and works in Aubervilliers (France). Language is the very basis of his work. The texts and poems he collects on the Internet are manipulated, transformed in order to become a vital flow, feeding into his sculptures. Through language as an ingredient, David Douard redefines space as hybrid and collective by injecting anonymous, chaotic, deviant, ill and frustrating poems in it. As he recreates an infected environment where the real world used to be, the fantasy brought by new digital technologies expands.

Texts by Charlie Fox, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Nina Kennel.