Still Life

Child’s Replay is a hallucinatory homecoming. As we follow THE CHILD in a series of private re-enactments, the present self is revealed as the past’s fragile construction. Pursuing the banality of trauma, a first-person character juxtaposes childhood events with internal misrepresentations, reflections on the emotional toll of migration, psychoanalytic theory, Brazilian history, and literary criticism. An exploration of the impact that language and fiction have on real bodies, Child’s Replay assembles a hybrid portrait of memory and anti-memory. 

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author. 

A take away cup and a cloud is an essay written alongside the dance performance Seems to be by Denise Lim and Stina Ehn. It plays with a variety of containers–the list form being one. By mixing a personal with a historical gaze it traces the trajectory of mundane commodities and  the replacement of material with imaterial objects brought about to the everyday by technical progress. 

FUGUES is a study of objects. Elements repeat and imitate one another like a polyphonic canon of voices narrating stories of domestic confinement in looped time.

With images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler & texts by artist Issy Wood, writer Ella Plevin, model Freja Beha Erichsen and curator Elaine Tam.

Dead Minutes is a storytelling game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.

The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.

The second half features an essay by Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author Chris Beckett, and a letter from Selma Selman.

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

The Poeticians is a publication of the performance of the collection of clothes and poetry called Writing Wounds To Heal by Swedish choreographer Pontus Pettersson. Made in velvet silk with the poetry burned out in the fabric exposing the texts, the poetry exposes both itself and the skin of the performer. Throughout the durational piece the performers are doing Pontus Petterssons cat practice and is one of the main ingredients of the project as well as the clothes/poems. The Poeticans is also a choreo-curational event that hosts different choreographic proposals inside of it. It is seen as module or installation where pieces, objects, performers can be inserted rather than a performance that executes and performs the same over and over. It was created as an extension of Pontus interest in poetry and choreography where hospitality and proximity is seen as key concepts in the development and execution of the event.

A day can be a composition not unlike an essay. Full of possibilities, full of limitations, bound by universal structures and marked by idiosyncratic desires. You go on walks. You read. You do your chores. All the while memory and other forms of imagination keep time with you. Books are strange companions; writing is a lonely thing rich with consolations.

Certain Things is a text by Claudia La Rocco, created with and through ideas such as these.

Published September 2022.

This book traces the legacy of Zona, Eastern Europe performance art festival that took place in Timișoara, Romania, between 1993 and 2002, years which were marked by a transition from communism to a new society built on different principles.

Bringing together artists from the former "Eastern Bloc," Zona became a space of encounters, a platform for theoretical discussions and postmodern art experiments, which displayed a remarkable diversity of artistic languages. The fall of the Berlin Wall, as Nicolas Bourriaud noted in his book "The Radicant", was the first decisive step towards globalization and the generalization of postmodern thought.

In the early 1990s, adopting subversive strategies helped artists overcome critical moments in totalitarian societies, which had been consolidated for decades in Eastern Europe. They combined techniques of expression such as pastiche, quotes, historical images, popular culture, or subcultures with personal mythologies. What resulted was often a critical mixture with an explosive effect. Body art became an appropriate language for critically analyzing stereotypes about the nation, religion, gender, or social prejudices and taboos. Body art facilitated the transfer of ideas and a dialogue with the audience, or it helped launch questions about identity politics. The concerns and intentions of the festival's protagonists were built around political, social, and artistic topics that were debated between the East and the West.

Essays by Ileana Pintilie, László Beke, Vladimir Bulat, Robert Fleck, Alexandra Titu, Berislav Valušek; artists' texts by Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejenaru, Ștefan Bertalan, Geta Brătescu, Oskar Dawicki, Ion Grigorescu, H.arta Group, Karen Kipphoff, Liliana Mericioiu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sorin Vreme.