Almanac is a fully trans-led press based in Helsinki, Finland. The first issue of this journal of trans poetics responds to the theme of light/heat, in time for the Summer Solstice. The work includes long form essays, prose and poetry dealing with love, sex, illness, hormones, and other sticky things.

Featuring the work of 15 trans writers: Adam Azzaro, Daphne DiFazio, Mino Buonincontri, Clay A.D, Jenevieve Ting, Saoirse Wall, El Reid-Buckley, Nadine Rodriquez, Iona Roisin, Teddy Binot, Maya Simkin, Fiadh Hoskin, Simon Hauwaerts, D Mortimer and River Ellen MacAskill.

Designed by Roby Redgrave McPherson

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Aren’t we all familiar with the deeply personal experience of waking up alone, in anguish and despair, from the depths of a nightmare? Whether it’s disordered sleeping, sleep paralysis or the more regular frightening dream, the night and its terrors have kept us occupied since the very beginning of humanity. For this issue of Simulacrum, we – together – delve into the furthest corners of our minds to discover the dark and disorienting meaning we might find there. But a nightmare is much more than something to be fearful of. The nightmare is entangled with our histories and can lead us to our deepest selves, by bringing up feelings which we don’t dare to feel in real life. It has provided many creators with inspiration for their art of many forms. As we will discover within this issue of Simulacrum, this personal aspect of the nightmare can lead to incredibly diverse approaches and interpretations that we hope will allow you to reconsider the meaning and feeling that nightmares can bring us.

Authors: Neža Kokol, Joyce Poot, Niels Noot, Jonas van Kappel, Jérémy Bernard, Kenneth Geurts, Denise van Rooij, Kim Mulder, Frank van der Wulp, Laure Vanrijckeghem, Sanne Kabalt.

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Is what is below the surface so fatal?

Becky posed this question in her piece, which speaks to a lot of what we’re trying to capture here in Drown, Good Drown.

In their own way, the writers expressed consciousness and subconsciousness immersed in empathy, stories with sentiment and hints of humor, sadness, and joy. These writings and drawings were made by us ArtCenter College of Design students in the summer of 2022.

Actually, Megan hates summer. As Megan says, “summer’s role is to forever choke and steal what life came after winter.”

She thinks June is okay.

Rachael gave us a downpour of thoughts, an imagistic stream of consciousness straight to our souls, and Sophia spoke in a tender melodic tone provoking a sense of coziness and the tension of intimacy.

While Ibrahim imagined life undersea as a telepathic realm of shadow twins.

Along with Constant’s honesty and vulnerability, we also got to share his quiet but bold humor reflected in his story.

We almost named the publication Esther Williams because of Natalia’s misfit mermaid tale, which inspired us to be who we really are.

My story of reminiscing leads to the end of the book leaving softhearted fragrances of nostalgia.

Me. Cringe.

Drown, Good Drown, I think, is most importantly a collaboration. We’re all so different. You’ll see. But our different perspectives are reflected in drawings and stories. We mish and mash our creative minds for a submersive experience for the reader more than any of us could accomplish on our own.

So we invite you to pour yourself a cool water on the rocks, snorkel through our creative minds, and drown in the world of our stories.

Trust me; it will be a good drown.

– The Editor

*
Type+Authorship is a multi-disciplinary class taught at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. We conjure, discuss, and immediately write our way into a book of collective thematic interest and function within an aggregate studio environment where we design and produce a publication.

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Futuros mejores condensa conversaciones, voces y proyectos a través de los cuales discutir e imaginar futuros espaciales más justos. Futuros que, desde las ruinas del presente, las violencias y exclusiones, imaginan alternativas capaces de vislumbrar nuevas posibilidades. Arquitecturas amables con otras especies y territorios, prácticas espaciales para la hospitalidad, mediadoras de memorias orales y microbianas, nuevos imaginarios para el aprendizaje, nuevas (y no tan nuevas) arquitecturas para el cuidado más allá de la vivienda y tecnologías domésticas al servicio del bien común para una producción espacial todavía por venir.

Autores: Husos Arquitecturas (Diego Barajas y Camilo García), Mariana Pestana, Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez, Candela Morado, Anna Puigjaner, Superflux, Alejandro Galliano, La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros, Studio Ossidiana.

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“Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use — in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations.” – ruangrupa

The documenta fifteen will be curated by a collective for the first time in its history. Another first: the artistic directors come from Asia. ruangrupa is an association of nine friends who unconditionally combine art with their everyday lives as a practice of living and surviving together under the socioeconomic conditions of their native Indonesia. Fourteen other collectives, so-called lumbung members, have been invited to join ruangrupa in transforming Kassel into a new, sustainable ekosistem. Lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, is the starting point for all their activities and also this documenta.

In this volume of the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice ruangrupa talks about their beginnings, the harsh struggle for survival under the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the post-dictatorship euphoria, student protests, punk, and video culture. About their first art projects, maintaining solidary social relationships, the Indonesian tradition of sharing, and their unusual approach to resources.

The autobiographical conversations are supplemented by five exemplary glimpses into ruangrupa’s projects since 2003 and unpublished archival material.

The Collective Eye (TCE), founded 2012 in Montevideo, organizes exhibitions and symposia on collective practice in art. The collective has pursued a partnership with DISTANZ since 2021, publishing the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice as an extended collective between the publishing team and TCE. Their work aims to strengthen polynational dialogues between different collectives as well as between collectives and theorists. The volume of conversations with ruangrupa is the fourth installation in the series.

The Collective Eye: Dominique Lucien Garaudel, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Emma Nilsson and Matthias Kliefoth (Eds.)

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It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O’Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French. An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.

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Published in 1962, the third novel by Pati Hill was written in the purest tradition of the American coming-of-age stories. It follows a sixteen-year-old girl, Francesca Hollins, while she discovers an unexpected taste for autonomy. The bravado of her affirmation cannot mask the seriousness of her conviction: “One thing I know, I will never be in love again.”

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Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young

First publication to document the use and potential of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in the arts that use blockchain technology and build on NFT innovations.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.

Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.”
–Hans Ulrich Obrist

How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too.
–Sadie Plant

This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world.
–Franco “Bifo” Beradi

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Please join us for a Book Presentation, Reading & Talk with Renée Thorne and Raimar Stange, at Motto Berlin.

Wednesday 27 July 2022
from 7pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

*Raimar Stange
Born 1960 in Hannover, Raimar Stange studied literature and philosophy. He works and lives in Berlin as a freelance critic and curator. Stange contributes regularly to Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich; Monopol, Berlin; artmagazine.cc, Vienna; Artist, Bremen and has written catalogue texts on, amongst others, Monica Bonvicini, Peter Friedl, Thomas Hirschhorn, Michel Majerus, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Silke Wagner, Johannes Wohnseifer and Stefanie von Schroeter. He curates exhibitions on climate change and post-democracy.

*Renée Thorne
Renée Thorne is an author and artist based in Basel, Switzerland. Her work spans from lyric essays and literary journalism to texts rooted in a performative practice. Renée recently finished an M.A. in Transdisciplinary Studies at Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and will begin teaching Creative Writing at Franklin University in the fall.

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Eurydice, Alive
Author: Renée Thorne
Publisher: art&fiction publications

Fusing essay, poetry and provocative prose, this hybrid work is an emotionally complex portrayal of loss and resurrection. The book ranges from memoir through myth to the overlapping lives of past artists in a fractal narrative traversing interior and exterior landscapes. In a brisk and unflinching account of the death of the narrator’s mother, the reader descends into the subterranean realms of grief as the loss unfurls into interconnected and unexpected stories of the underworld. From Eurydice’s indifferent return to Orpheus to a poet`s regret for the ghost that haunts him, each story is rich with the resonances in-between. Written in simple yet elegant prose, it is a story about emergence and the struggle to come alive. The result is a text as intense and urgent as the heartbeat the author is seeking.

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Second edition of the short story by Chilean writer Romina Reyes about female love and friendship in a public school of Chile during student protest. Includes drawings by Chilean artist Violeta Cereceda.

Hambre Hambre Hambre is a lesbian initiative from Santiago, Chile, that amplifies the work of women and dissidents in Latin America. We experiment from a feminist perspective with economic publications, unconventional formats and propaganda. Each fanzine is a unique recipe, cooked intimately with its collaborators. Our editions include similar interventions that value manual trades. Among the authors are the artists and writers Oni88, Fernanda Ivanna, Lucia Reissig, Romina Reyes and Paz Ortúzar.

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