27—28.04.2024
Back-to-back: perspectives on artists' writing and publishing
In the context of the word and book festival ‘Druk in Leuven’, Off the Grid (Cas-co’s residency and presentation platform) engages with the relevance of these media within contemporary art through a two-day programme of talks, performances, and readings, devoted to publishing as artistic practice.
Publishing and bookbinding terminology abounds in bodily metaphors and vocabulary borrowed from choreography, like dos à dos (‘back-to-back’) or tête-bêche (‘head-to-toe’). This dual meaning, also apparent in the festival’s title Druk (translating to both ‘edition’ and ‘pressure’), underscores publishing’s intrinsic connection to materiality – of printed matter and the writer’s/ reader’s physicality – and offers a premise for the exploration of the relationship between text and body.
From the vantage points of the invited artist, writers, publishers, curators, and designers, frequently performing several of those roles simultaneously, the programme explores an expanded field of publishing, with a particular focus on its performative dimension.
Taking place across two afternoons, the programme strings together a series of diverse contributions that in some places touch each other and address, amongst other, the position of writing and reading within artistic practice; how textual objects – books, scores, documents, records – can be (re)published through performance; and how networks and communities of practice are formed through publishing.
Participating guests: Henry Andersen, Clara Amaral, Francesca Hawker, Will Holder, Martha Jager, Jeroen Peeters, Isabelle Sully, Reinier Vrancken. Curated by and with participation of current curator-in-residence Alicja Melzacka.
Read more about the contributors and the programme below.
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Saturday, 13:00 | discussion group on writing and illness
We will engage with selected texts that address, and at times embody, the need for a new kind of language that Virginia Woolf called for, one capable of expressing the ailments of illness.
The kind of language that produces diseased, ‘smudged-glass-writing’, whose surface has been texturised by experience, greased with topical ointments, and fogged from the condensation of feverish exhales.
Through the lens of writing on illness, we can approach the problem of the limits of expressibility and empathy (vs contagion) in the context of readership/viewership. It is also an experiment in the making, exploring whether and how these kinds of texts can be experienced collectively.
To ensure comfortable scale, the number of places for this even is limited. If you’re interested in joining, email offthegrid@cas-co.be. Preparatory reading is not required, but if you email us, we will provide the texts in advance of the session.
Alicja Melzacka is currently curator-in-residence at Cas-co. She always imagined she would become either a translator, writer, or artist, and how she understands curating takes a bit from all of these disciplines. In her current work, she aims to integrate writing and curating, often thinking from or through specific textual practices, such as non-linear storytelling, genre hybridity, or embodied writing.
Seeing the invitation to organise this programme as an opportunity to expand her research, she extended that invitation to several artists and curators with whom she maintains an ongoing dialogue, and to those with whom she would like to engage in one.
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Saturday, 15.30 | lecture-performance
‘Reader, I invite you to do the reading of the writing of my reading of what I am writing,’ writes the French poet Francis Ponge in ‘La table’ (1967−73), the last of his notebook works, devoted to the table that is his immediate work environment. In this performance reading, Jeroen Peeters takes up the invitation to do the reading of this notebook and the tables it evokes.
Jeroen Peeters is an essayist who works across the media of writing, not-writing, performance and publication. He researches matters such as ecologies of attention, material literacy, readership, commoning and cultural rewilding. Recent books include Bookmarks of sorts (2021) and And then it got legs: Notes on dance dramaturgy (2022). Together with Mette Edvardsen he runs the publishing house Varamo Press. Peeters is a research fellow at Hasselt University, Faculty of Architecture and Arts, and PXL-MAD School of Arts.
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Saturday, 16:15 | performance
Do you remember that time we were together and danced this or that dance? To remember a dance by remembering the counts, the space, the feeling. Also, the sweat, the steps and context; to remember the memory of what we remember dancing, the ones that we danced with or imagined while dancing. To remember a dance that we never really danced. Dancing as a fake title, an imagination, fantasy and fiction.
This performance presents a book, which was written and learnt by heart by Clara Amaral, and it is transmitted in one-on-one sessions of 30 minutes (in this particular context the reading can be witnessed by an audience). This book actually exists, but it has only been seen by Clara Amaral, Dongyoung Lee (designer), and Loïc Perela (another performer who knows the book by heart).
Clara Amaral is an artist working with writing, performance, printed matter and publishing. Her interdisciplinary practice questions what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading, writing and publishing. Central to her practice is the investigation of publishing modalities and the performative aspect of language.
In January 2021 Clara initiated misted.cc, an online platform: A book of sorts. Every new moon an artist, writer, graphic designer or curator, contributes a text. Throughout the month the contribution vanishes in direct relation to the number of visitors, leaving, eventually, an empty website until the next contribution is published. As of the new moon of February 2022, misted.cc is edited by Clara Amaral and Simon Asencio.Clara’s work She gave it to me I got it from her, with graphic design by Ronja Andersen and Karoline Świeżyński, was published in 2021 by Kunstverein Publishing. This volume is part of a broader research on publishing modalities and their relation to performative practices.
Her works have been presented in The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Austria, France, Norway and Switzerland, etc.
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Saturday, 17:00 | table-read
In this table-read, readers and listeners will collect around a table to read through a script, which is comprised of biographies of people, both historical and contemporary, who were or are ‘into’ eels – a species whose sexual determination and mating habits have eluded scientists for years. The presentation follows on from work produced during a writing residency in January 2024 at House Van Wassenhove, organised by Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens and MORPHO. Jellied refreshments will be provided.
Francesca Hawker is based in London and is often in Brussels. She graduated from the Dutch Art Institute Masters programme in 2020. She works across the fields of performance, poetry, installation, music, self-publishing, and comedy. Prevalent themes include failure, friendship, and the maintenance of communal fantasies. She often works collaboratively within the “slapstick of ordinary relation”, defined by Lauren Berlant as a way of “trying to stay in the same enough conversation in order to build something together that neither of us could build by ourselves.” She has presented work at a range of institutions including Jester, Genk (2023), KIOSK, Gent (2022), and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2021), and has contributed to a number of festivals including International Performance Art Giswil, Switzerland (2023), Oscillation Festival, Brussels (2022), and Konvooi Festival, Bruges (2022).
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Sunday, 13:00 | conversation
Teeth Surrounding a Flower in the Meanings is Reinier Vrancken’s recently published book of erasure poetry, in which he draws on sixteen texts on sixteen of his pieces written by curators and critics between 2016 and 2023. It is also an unconventional ‘companion reader’ to Vrancken’s practice at large, wherein each poem takes one of his pieces as a constraint against which its form is shaped.
The conversation with curator Alicja Melzacka will manoeuvre between this book and their shared fascination with the relationship between art and writing.
Reinier Vrancken lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
In his artistic practice, he moves in and out of material and immaterial worlds through oblique connections and poetic leaps.
His installations, interventions, objects and artist books test with lyric attention the vague contours of physical and conceptual bodies — their diffusion and plurality in particular forming the subject of artistic address — and become entry points for articulating their underlying kinships. -
Sunday, 14:00 | talk
In this rambling attempt at some kind of cohesion, collaborators Martha Jager and Isabelle Sully will present their individual publishing practices, ones which paved the way for the formation of Playbill — an event-based platform for experimental language and text-based artistic works that the two established in 2022. Spanning self-initiated publishing projects, epistolary enunciations and administrative anecdotes, Messy Keynote will attempt to formalise Jager’s and Sully’s approach to publishing as artistic and curatorial practice.
Martha Jager is an artist, curator and publisher whose practice unfolds at the intersection of making and curating. With the everyday and the domestic realm as a site for the production of art as an overarching subject, her work focuses on personal histories, administration and archiving as a form of presentation. Often collaborative, her work takes the form of performances, exhibitions, public programmes and publications. She is the founder of Dear, a postal publishing platform dedicated to the epistolary form and co-curator of Playbill, an event-based initiative focused on text — and language based practices in Amsterdam.
Isabelle Sully is an artist, writer and curator. Originally from Melbourne/Naarm, she now lives in the Netherlands where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-curator of Playbill and artistic director of A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam. -
Sunday, 15:00 | reading
Republishing is a tactic frequently used by Andersen in his work. As such, the invitation from Cas-co has opened up a chance to produce and distribute a bootleg of Duncan Smith’s essay ‘On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil’, dating back to 1979, the year of the global oil crisis in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Smith was an elusive figure in literary circles, having published only one book of essays (‘The Age of Oil’, 1987) in his lifetime before passing prematurely in 1991. Andersen will deliver a reading from this scarce resource, while some copies will be circulated via Cas-co’s bookstore.
Henry Andersen studied as a composer of experimental music in Perth and Berlin before moving to Brussels and retraining as a visual artist. He makes performances, sculpture, sound recordings and printed matter, sometimes alone and sometimes in collaboration with Bryana Fritz under the name Slow Reading Club.
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Sunday, 15:30, passages translated by Will Holder
Typographer Will Holder likes to use public time to do something normally done in private: such as work on a book. He is currently translating Kate Briggs’ novel, The Long Form, the story of two people composing a day together. It is a day of movements and improvisations, common and uncommon rhythms, stopping and starting again. “I finished […] and started again from the beginning; I wanted to understand how this miracle of a book had come to be; I was not ready to let go.” [Moyra Davey]. As the morning progresses, a book – The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding – is delivered, and the scope of the day widens further. “I got the feeling … not of interrupting my life by reading it, but understanding what it means to interrupt a book with a life.” [Elisa Wouk Almino]. Small incidents of the day revive some of the oldest preoccupations of the novel: the force of social circumstance, the power of names, the meaning of duration and the work of love.
Kate Briggs grew up in Somerset, UK, and lives and works in Rotterdam, NL, where she founded and co-runs the writing and publishing project ‘Short Pieces That Move’. She is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture and seminar notes at the Collège de France: The Preparation of the Novel and How to Live Together, both published by Columbia University Press. The Long Form follows This Little Art, a narrative essay on the practice of translation (both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Typographer Will Holder edited and published F.R.DAVID, from 2007 – 24, a journal concerned with the organisation of reading & writing in the arts (co-published with de Appel, Amsterdam 2007 – 16, and KW, Berlin 2017 – 24). In 2017, Holder was inaugural fellow of “A Year With…”, at KW, Berlin: a year-long programme placing publishing, writing and documentation in parallel with the institution’s exhibition programme. Holder furnished and ran a private residency with 13 guests, publicly discussing and producing publications, on site at KW. This period laid the foundations for uh books, and Will’s work with Alice Notley will be the last book it will publish. The singular “uh” suggests an adaptive whole of a plural “books”. The disparity between logotype (a) and its phonetic “uh” (say out loud: “a sandwich, a wallet […] a giraffe”) is suggestive of the publisher’s work with artists, musicians, dancers, readers & audience using conversation as model and means for writing; by way of speech, performance and transcription.Holder has received a Paul Hamlyn Award in support of his practise, and has had most recent solo displays of his work at British Art Show, (various venues) UK; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Institut Funder Bakker, Denmark; Oscillations Festival, Brussels; Kunstverein, München; and Alma Sarif, Brussels. Amongst many others, Will has made books with Cady Noland, Ricardo Basbaum, Robert Ashley, Michael Stevenson, The Otolith Group, Falke Pisano, Lucy Skaer; and he has published the work of poets Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, and H.D.
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Sunday, 17:30 | performance
Budget Statements takes the itemised annual budget of a small artist-run platform in Amsterdam as the score for a staging of institutional activities. With Julie Ault’s words inscribed as a guiding principle, ‘a budget is priorities made concrete.’ Administration is the domain where public resources are computed, assigned and distributed. You can’t hide in the numbers, transparency is key.