Invited selections of titles highlighting specific researches and/or practices, as well as recent acquisitions
BOOKLAUNCH : HOOT #4 by Gufo at SOMA Marseille
For the launch of HOOT Issue 4, with the Soft Digest Protest, Gufo has invited Giselle’s Books and other publishing projects at SOMA Marseille. For the occasion, Giselle’s books presented a selection of titles related to notions of translation, transcription and language.
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Find out more about Gufo and HOOT on their website: www.gufoofug.com
The Disassembled Dictionary is a growing series of books that each, in various ways, discusses a particular word.
“Science fiction” consists of various plots for sci-fi novels found by Leif Holmstrand and Pär Thörn, an essay by Jerry Määttä, an artist’s statement by Niklas Wallenborg, and time- and space-related lines by Arnold Schwarzenegger characters compiled by Oscar Guermouche, Sandra Praun and Tessa Praun.
The Disassembled Dictionary is a growing series of books that each, in various ways, discusses a particular word.
“Portrait” consists of a glossary of synonyms and an essay by artist and poet Leif Holmstrand.
Experimenting with the form and register of contemporary art writing, With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form reconfigures the seminal artist’s book / catalog When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Originally edited by Harald Szeemann to accompany the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition of the same name, When Attitudes Become Form brought together new tendencies in the art of its time, including arte povera, conceptual art, and post-Minimalism, to conceive curatorial practice as a linguistic medium. Working with Szeemann’s artist’s book/catalog as case study, With A Bao A Qu reflects on the form and structure of the artist’s book. By stylistically adopting a subjective literary voice, drawn, at least partially, from Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (published in English in 1969), the book counterintuitively shifts focus away from the reading of art’s conceptual properties to that of its physical, material embodiment.
"An entertaining and thought provoking addition to the reexamination of one of art history’s most mythologized exhibitions that demonstrates how language is attitude and how words are form." ⎯ Jens Hoffmann
Today I left home and by Camille Kaiser is a compilation of episodes that all begin with the same sentence and unfold in narratives that describe everyday incidents encountered by the protagonist after she leaves the safe space of her domestic interior. Navigating urban spheres, wandering, absurdity, the anecdotal, absence of adventure and a vain quest for exoticism are recurring events that confront perceptions of everyday life. The markers of place and time are absent, establishing the narrator as the only point of reference.
Over a thousand years ago a form of material code emerged among the Andes mountains. By means of knotted ropes, called ‘quipus’, numbers and words were enacted. This publication The Andean Information Age knots together a universe of stories related to the quipu system, the history of its ongoing decipherment, and the disruption that this sensorial code may be able to trigger in our present.
Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban—ecologies that can never be reduced simply to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city.
Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiments with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Brar foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life.
Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of Blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Brar rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary Black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in Blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism.
Published on the occasion of the collaboration between 3 137 and the curator Ilaria Conti, within the framework of the sync Curatorial Fellowship (January – March 2020) Around Labor, Art, and the Auratic Condition (This is Not a Love Song), the edition features as contributions texts by four curators and scholars who have been active in Athens, Greece, on issues of labor in art, including iLiana Fokianaki, Elpida Karaba, Evita Tsokanta, and Despina Zefkili; an image by Erica Scourti especially commissioned for the publication; the Greek translation of key language tools developed by the U.S. based organization Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.); and a collection of practical and playful exercises to rethink and reorganize one’s immaterial labor. The publication is designed by Yannikos Vasiloulis.
This is a reprint of Pati Hill’s 1979 book published on the occasion of her first posthumous solo exhibition in Europe, Something other than either, at Kunstverein München on view from March through May 2020. The book is comprised of images and texts by Hill through which she intended to contextualize and explain her working methodology to Jill Kornblee, her New York gallerist.
Sex Magazine: #1-10 will collect the first ten issues of Sex, in print for the first time–a physical testament to the influential power of the web and an unrivaled account of art and culture at the coming of age of the new millennium.
Sex is a culture magazine based in New York. Designed originally for the web, Sex has acted as a real-time archive of a spectrum of creative ideas available to anyone who wants to take the time to look. The list of artists, graphic designers, musicians, fashion designers, writers, and photographers featured in these digital editions reads like a yearbook of the most important forces in the shifting creative landscape of the post-internet era, including Venus X, Maggie Lee, Daniel McDonald, Bill Strobeck, Harsh Patel, Cali Thornhill Dewitt, Susan Cianciolo, Almalia Ulman, Spencer Sweeny, Total Freedom, Eckhaus Latta, Petra Cortright, Gerlan Jeans, Ratking, Peggy Noland, Jacob Ciocci, and many others.
Inspired by the independent magazine renaissance at the turn of the millennium, (Index, Butt, Made in USA) Sex sought to create it’s own culture with a digital-native, lofi aesthetic on a largely unregulated internet, giving voice to new ideas and attitudes towards both art and life alike. Sex is a response to the stalemate between the Internet and print–looking to the principles of its favorite magazines as an exit strategy towards new frontiers.
Asher Penn is a New York based artist and founder of Sex magazine. He has contributed to numerous magazines including Artforum, Interview, Bad Day, Art In America, The Heavy Mental, and Monster Children.
This publication is based on the exhibition of the same name hosted by the Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V., Berlin, April 28 to June 24/August 19, 2017. Accompanying the two major neon sculptural installations from that exhibition, The Statisticon Neon and Pizzagate, it is an analysis of the emerging political conditions of late-stage cognitive capitalism, conditions in which the brain and mind exist as the factories of the 21st century. Of particular interest in this analysis is the brain’s neural plasticity, and the role of new technologies in harnessing its potential. Also crucial is the role of art in creating new, distinctive methods, atmospheres, and intensities with which to thwart new methodologies of subsumption.
Series Series is a series of interviews between a contemporary artist and curator Jacob Fabricius. Series Series is a casual conversation about work and life. The interviews are conducted through emails, text messages and meetings, and illustrated with images chosen by the artist.
WENDY’S SUBWAY
Beautiful hand delivery of Wendy’s Subway recent titles. We are very enthusiastic about stocking these! Available for loans and browsing through the library.
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Wendy’s Subway is a non-profit. reading room, writing space and independentpublisher located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Since 2013, they have provided an open and versatile platform for expanding modes of reading, writing and publishing. Wendy’s subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical and discursive engagement with arts and literature, with the belief that equitable access to reading and collaborative forms of knowledge-production are catalysts for social transformation.
Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.
Glaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.
Marking the Occasion represents the final movement in a year-long engagement with the question, "Can a performance be a rough draft of a written work?" In this case, the rough draft took place at Mount Tremper Arts during a 2019 Watershed Residency. Taking the practices of choreography and co-writing as methods of investigation, curator-editors Jaime Shearn Coan and Tara Aisha Willis introduce new trajectories for live work and text by bringing together dance and performance artists from across the US who occupy multiple roles within art economies and in whose work language and writing are prevalent. Exploring a multiplicity of lived, embodied experiences within a single event, Marking the Occasion gathers together archival materials from the residency alongside new contributions from participants David Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Mariana Valencia, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Mlondi Zondi. The publication also marks the events of 2020, and traces their reverberations through each artist's practice as time, movement, action, and collaboration take on new meanings.
Ritual and Capital is an expansive volume that collects an interdisciplinary range of voices and genres that reflect on ritual as a form of resistance against capitalism. The poems, essays, and artworks included in this anthology explore habits and practices formed to subvert, subsist, and survive under the repression of capital. These works explore the refuge in ritual, how ritual practices might endow objects with qualities that resist market values, the use of ritual in embodied practices of healing and care, and how ritual strengthens communities.
The publication of Ritual and Capital is the culmination of a series of public readings organized by Wendy’s Subway as part of the Spring 2016 Reading Room residency at the Bard Graduate Center. Co-published by the Bard Graduate Center and Wendy’s Subway, Ritual and Capital is the first title in the BGCX series, a publication series designed to expand time-based programming after the events themselves have ended. Springing from the generative spontaneity of conversation, performance, and hands-on engagement as their starting points, these experimental publishing projects will provide space for continued reflection and research in a form that is inclusive of a variety of artists and makers.
Contributors :
Jeff Alessandrelli and Amy Lawless, Mitch Anzuoni, Justin Blinder, Catherine Chen, Jackie Clark, DJ Ashtrae, Ted Dodson, Shou Jie Eng, Future Host, Jeremy Hoevenaar, Mia Kang, Josef Kaplan, Rebecca Keith, Matthew Kosinski, Krystal Languell, Matt Longabucco, Cameron Quan Louie, Miranda Mellis, Feliz Lucia Molina, Devin N. Morris, Laura Mullen, Sarah Passino, Daniel Poppick, Judah Rubin, Danniel Schoonebeek, Cam Scott, Shelby Shaw, Josh Silver, Maya Sisneros (with David Bowles, Rodney Gomez, Emmy Pérez, José Antonio Rodríguez, and Veronica Sandoval aka Lady Mariposa), Eirik Steinhoff, Celina Su, Takáts Márk, Deirtra Thompson, David Whelan, Matthew Whitley, Rachael Guynn Wilson.
Return to the Field began as an invitation to consider questions of environment, affect, and mapping emotional and physical points of contact between the human and the landscape alongside visual artist Martha Tuttle and her collaborator and co-editor, poet Gabriel Kruis. Including drawings, poems, photography, sonic maps, and an experimental digital project by Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, David Johnson, Suzanne Kite, Charmaine Lee, Philip Matthews, Nat Ward, and Sara J. Winston, Return to the Field assembles a dense and resonant, multi-vocal conversation threaded together by Kruis’ book-length poem, “A Connectome.”
Among a Sea of Influences documents a series of workshops and conversations hosted by Wendy’s Subway and organized by English-Arabic bilingual magazine Makzhin editor Mirene Arsanios on questions of formative literary influences. Three female Arab writers were invited to choose and discuss ten books that shaped their understanding of poetry and translation. Notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, Marwa Helal, Mona Kareem, and Iman Mersal played along, selecting—among a sea of influences—authors and/or translators whose works were key to their own practice, and to their embodied understanding of what it means to write in Arabic from a female perspective. Asking what kind of writings are/were available to them, and which books or translations unseated their understanding of the world, Helal, Kareem, and Mersal discuss writing within the diaspora and across borders, radical publishing and translation networks, cultural and linguistic translation, vernacular language as resistance, and more.
Xenoglossia is concerned with breaking apart and reworking the English language—in order to speak, and let speak, the waters around us. Through its investigation of the plural and severed (via routes of colonization and migration) lyric-I, its insistence on the language and voice of water, and its explorations of mining, translating, and traversing tongues, the book asks (after the poet Myung Mi Kim) and attempts to answer the question “What is English now?” How do we say what we must in a language mired with histories of colonialism? How do we pull forth the assertions, declarations, pleas, and moments from behind and between its crevices?
JJJJJerome Ellis’s The Clearing asks how stuttering, blackness, and music can be practices of refusal against hegemonic governance of time, speech, and encounter. Taking his glottal block stutter as a point of departure, Ellis figures the aporia and the block as clearing to consider how dysfluency, opacity, and refusal can open a new space for relation. Stemming from Ellis's essay "The clearing: Music, dysfluency, Blackness, and time,” published in 2020 in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies (Volume 5, Issue 2) the present volume transcribes and translates his investigation across genres and media, turning to the page to ask: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body? Can a book be not just a manuscript, but a glottoscript? Ellis opens space for thinking liberation theoretically, historically, and lyrically.
This publication was printed on the occasion of IMAGE SPEAK, a course on the essay film led by Rachel James and Georgia Wall at Wendy’s Subway from February 12-April 9, 2018. Released April 9, 2018 for the IMAGE SPEAK public screening at Spectacle Theater.
Contributors :
Logan Chappe, Michelle Huynh Chu, Rachel Haberstroh, Sara O’Brien, Guy Pettit, Joseph Rosen, Meghan Surges, Alexandra Tatarsky, and Nicole Wallace.
AFTER 8 BOOKS
Massive After 8 Books arrival spanning most of their existence as a publisher since 2017. We are excited for thee to be available for free loans through the library in Marseille !
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After 8 Books is an independent bookstore and publisher based in Paris.
The bookstore, onsite and online, welcomes the printed endeavours of contemporary artists, thinkers, writers, musicians, poets, and other art workers. We work with international publishers, mostly independent ones, involved in questions of art, culture, and theory. We propose a “handpicked” selection of new and seminal monographs, artists’ books, catalogues, essays, novels, non fiction books, journals and zines, that you may not find altogether ever again.
This is the first monograph on the internationally acclaimed French Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa (born 1985). Love, hatred, war, technology, social unrest, bodies and words in crisis: this is the material of which Beloufa’s work is made. His films, sculptures and multimedia installations audaciously explore how art can address today’s issues, challenging contemporary representations of social relationships, power games, and political and economic structures. An artist favoring collaborations over authorship, and responsive strategies over predetermined intentions, Beloufa has invented his own work methods, and a particular approach to the studio.The catalog presents the artist’s projects over the past 12 years, including recent experiments with online platforms and NFTs; it takes as its starting point Beloufa’s solo show, Digital Mourning, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and offers a non-conformist take on the genre of the monograph, thanks to Olivier Lebrun’s playful and inventive book design.
A new version of our first publication and bestseller: Evelyn’s adventures as a transgender masseuse in Amsterdam, back when she was a young artist, supporting herself by working in a massage salon. The texts are witty, sharp and thoughtful, reflecting a very specific community of friends and coworkers and its counterpart, the male clientele. The drawings illustrating those texts are dreamlike watercolors, perfect companions to Unintended Experience’s diaristic journey.
A key figure in the New York art scene, Amy Sillman is renowned for her singular approach to painting and drawing. Her writings extend a practice that challenges traditions and theoretical frameworks with criticality and humor, and advocates subjectivity: she reevaluates Abstract Expressionism with a queer eye, explores the meanings of color and shape, and discusses in depth the work of other artists—from Delacroix to Maria Lassnig to Laura Owens. In Faux Pas, a collection of her most recent essays, alongside her cartoons and original drawings, art—as personal as it is political—is a practice that responds to today’s struggles.
“In these seventeen scintillating essays Amy Sillman excites, provokes ideas, plunders and aggravates language, detonates words with innovation, the way she does paint, pencil, color, line, stroke, mark, etc. She uniquely renders words to foreground pictures and picture-making, and builds avenues, pathways to lead to other ways of apprehending art.”
—from the foreword by Lynne Tillman
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.
It’s 4:50 am, without an alarm clock ringing, the rage comes out, why ? Sherian Mohammed Forster questions the abstract patterns that get into our heart and hurt, from Instagram trends to planes that take off with or without us.
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.
This is a chapter in which nothing happens. (Even more
so than usual).
I am taking a day off, to lie on the floor.
My yoga mat purple corrugated mousse sticks
slightly where my skin touches it, sticky soft hug of
homebound self-abandonment;
An excerpt from Claire Finch’s upcoming book. An anachronistic epistolary exchange including democratic theory, gender studies, and dildos, where love and the void question each other in action.
Fade the Lure is a collection of poems and photographs created between 2014 and 2017, during Dena Yago’s experience working and living alongside emotional support dogs in Los Angeles. In Yago’s words, poetry is sometimes “a form of communication created out of the desire to avoid, and an inability to engage in other forms of direct communication” with animals or humans. Fade the Lure explores the possibility for the poem to account for relationships that materialize and live beyond words, while being embedded in a consumerist society’s confined structures.
The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.
This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.
MAYRA RODRÍGUEZ CASTRO
Mayra Rodríguez Castro is a writer and translator. She is the editor of Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe (Kenning Editions, 2020). Her contributions appear in The Poetry Project, Social Text, The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She lives across cities.
SIGNS FICTION — Ruth Wolf Rehfeldt, published by Chert Galerie, Motto Books
Petrit Halilaj — Petrit Halilaj published by Kunstraum Innsbruck, Chert, 2011
Flamme et lilas — John Berger published by Seuil éd., 1996
Dernier journal — Krishnamurti, published by Points éd., 1997
Sur le chemin des glaces — Werner Herzog, published by Payot éd., 2009
Éloge de l’ombre — Junichirô Tanizaki, published by Verdier éd., 2011
Helio Oiticica — published MMK / Hatje Cantz, 2013
Le caractère fétiche de l’objet d’art et son secret — Brouillon Général, 2012
Ready To Get Bleeding (signed) — Jason Dodge, published by Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne, 2016